When using views to handle the taxonomy term pages, you may not have the taxonomy term description available in your page variable scope (either page.tpl.php or page-taxonomy.tpl.php). If you'd like to display it at the top of the page, you can add a preprocess function in your theme to add the variable:
<?php
function MYTHEME_preprocess_page(&$variables) {
// check to see if this is a taxonomy term page
if (arg(0)=='taxonomy' && arg(1)=='term') {
// load the taxonomy term object
$term = taxonomy_get_term(arg(2));
// add the taxonomy term description to the variables
$variables['taxonomy_term_description'] = $term->description;
}
}
?>Now in your page.tpl.php (or page-taxonomy.tpl.php) file, you can add the following line of PHP to output the description. NOTE: I enclosed it in a div with a class so I can add necessary CSS easily.
<?php
if ($taxonomy_term_description) print "<div class='taxonomy_term_description'>$taxonomy_term_description</div>";
?>










Thank you for this. I was
Thank you for this. I was trying to get a term name into an RSS link title attribute and even though it's not directly related to you post, it helped me visualize and understand extracting what I wanted from the object ($term->name).
I do this to generate a RSS feed on a taxonomy term page through Panels:
<?php$objects = taxonomy_get_term(arg(2));
drupal_add_feed(url('taxonomy/term/' . arg(2) . '/0/feed'), 'RSS Feed for ' . $objects->name);
?>