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How To Create A New Section Of ‘Pages’ And Have The Links Populate Automatically

Posted on August 7, 2008
Filed Under Wordpress Solutions |

Ok, so i thought i’d mention this one as i had someone request it before. Basically the example here is for a case where you may want to add a seperate section of Wordpress Pages that does not show up under the ‘Pages’ section in the sidebar (About, Contact us, etc.), but rather a seperate section of pages.

Let’s take a site about Soccer, for example. I have my standard Wordpress Pages such as ‘About’, ‘Contact Me’, ‘Privacy Policy’ etc but i also want another section of Pages under these in the sidebar about my favorite soccer teams. I want to be able to create a Wordpress Page (as opposed to a ‘Post’) about each of my favorite soccer teams and have them appear under a heading of ‘My Favorite Teams’. Here’s what you need to do:

Edit your sidebar.php file and find the part where it references the pages i.e. This line will be contained within a section like this:

<?php wp_list_pages(’title_li=Pages’ ); ?>

Make sure all your pages have already been created, then find out what each page ID is - make a seperate note of these. You can find the page IDs by going into WP-ADMIN>MANAGE>PAGES and hovering over each page - note the ‘post=X’ number at the end of the page’s url at bottom of your browser’s status bar - that ‘X’ number is the page id of the page. So you would make the code look something like this:

<?php wp_list_pages(’include=a,b,c&title_li=Pages’ ); ?>

<?php wp_list_pages(’include=x,y,z&title_li=My Favorite Teams’ ); ?>

What you are essentially doing here is splitting the pages into 2 sections - ‘Pages’ and ‘My Favorite Teams’, telling it explicitly which pages are to be included in each of those sections. So for example if i wanted to include pages 1, 2 and 3 in the ‘Pages’ section my code would be:

<?php wp_list_pages(’include=1,2,3&title_li=Pages’ ); ?>

and then in the ‘My Favorite Teams’ section i can include all the team pages i want, referring to the list of Page IDs i made previously - lets say for example pages with ID’s of 6,9,11,12,15. Here is the code for that.

<?php wp_list_pages(’include=6,9,11,12,15&title_li=My Favorite Teams’ ); ?>

Save the sidebar.php file and upload it to your host server, overwriting the original - of course make sure you have backups just in case.

The only downside to doing this procedure is that you need to manually keep your pages updated.  If you add a new Team Page down the track in the example above then you need to find the page ID and then add it into the code.  So a bit of ongoing housekeeping, but that’s the price to pay for a cool customization :)

Comments

One Response to “How To Create A New Section Of ‘Pages’ And Have The Links Populate Automatically”

  1. beets on September 11th, 2008 9:22 pm

    Nice site Paul :)

    You could also use what you have above for the a,b,c.. but then for the Favorite Teams one you could use:

    wp_list_pages(’exclude=a,b,c&title_li=My Favorite Teams’ );

    That way, you don’t have to keep updating your code as you add pages. :)

    (at least i’m pretty sure that would work.. haven’t tested) ;)

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