Pages in Wordpress are displayed automatically as navigation menu items on most themes. While many people like this feature, some prefer controlling how and which page gets displayed which I shall discuss in this post.
Any page having the Page Status of Published will be listed in the navigation bar according to a special Wordpress template tag placement within the theme. Some may have pages displayed at the header navigation bar while others listed on the sidebar.
Depending on where your pages are listed, open the header.php file if it’s at the header or the sidebar.php if it’s at the sidebar, both found in your current theme’s folder and look for the following code(use Find feature of your favourite Text Editor):
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?> (varying according to different theme)
which is wrapped around an <ul></ul> tag.
Depending on the kind of results or effect you want(for e.g listing specific pages,determining pages’ position,etc), change that template tag accordingly as described in the post, Getting the Most Out of Your Wordpress Template Tags: Listing Pages from Theme Playground.
Else to have maximum control, remove the
<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?> template tag and place the link to your pages by yourself, thus deciding by your own about their position and which one appear.
To place a page link, use the following code placing it within the <ul></ul> tag.
<li><a href="link to your page" title="link description">Page title</a></li>
To obtain the page’s link, login to your Wordpress admin section. Navigate to Manage > Pages > Click on View under the Action heading for that particular page you want the link and grab that page’s link from the address bar when it’s being displayed.
Special page template
Many “good” themes come with special pages specifically made for a particular purpose like listing your archives in a structured way or providing you with a link’s page(blogroll). To create and display such page, Login to your Wordpress admin section. Navigate to Write > Write Page. At your right side among the page’s options tab, Under Page Template, click to see the options’ items under the drop down menu. You’ll there know what kind of special page your theme is currently providing you with. Select the appropriate page template you want and click Publish to get and see the results.
Themes such as myJournal Hypereal and Cutline come out of the box with great page template like Archives, Links(blogroll) and Sitemap page. So next time you’re choosing a theme, look into such particular details too.
Should you be allowing discussion on Pages?
While I don’t like displaying the comment’s form on Pages, I wouldn’t recommend you doing this too. First because you would be keeping a page like a static content region where you don’t want people to post comments or send trackback. Most themes don’t come with comments on pages. To check whether yours come with that feature : login to your Wordpress admin section > Manage > Pages > Click Edit under any page and at your right hand side among the page’s options, at the Discussion box, check Allow Comments and Allow Pings checkbox. Save the page and get to that page on your blog. There, see whether the comment’s form is being displayed.
But then sometimes you would be wanting such feature, for e.g displaying the comment’s form on the contact page or about page so that people can leave you a little message if they want, without bothering to send you an email. To provide the commenting feature on pages if your theme doesn’t come with it(see above to check this), proceed as follows. In your current theme’s folder, open the page.php file, add the following code just after the <?php the_content() ?> template tag:
<?php comments_template(); ?>
Now when the options under Discussion, Allow Comments and Allow Pings are checked, the comment form should be displayed on your pages.
Current page listing effect
Another effect you would want when displaying pages, is providing visitors a clue of which page they are currently on. You can accomplish this by getting over the quick tutorial, WordPress: Active Page Tabs of Nathan Rice on the subject.
Hope you enjoyed this post, please subscribe to my feeds to stay in touch with BlogoSquare. Thanks for reading. If you have got any questions or need further clarification, please do take a comment and I would be glad to help you right away.
Tags: 21 Comments
21 responses so far ↓
Thanks for the tips. I didn’t know about the Special Page templates. I guess I should try to mess with my admin interface a bit more
Nice post buddy , stumbled
I use blogger only. Maybe it will be of use to me in future. Thanks. Stumbled.
grammatical error altert!
“they want without bothering sending you an email.” the want? they wont?
Thnx Sindhu for pointing out the error! It’s corrected. Actually it is “they want” and it missed only a “,”. It’s corrected.
Thnx Ramkarthik and Madhur for the stumble.
You should always be wary when messing with the template of the blog Gabriel. For any help, plz do not hesitate to contact us.
[…] Things you should know when displaying pages in Wordpress: quick guide on things Wordpress users should be knowing with listing Pages. […]
Actually the “list-pages” tag allows you to choose which pages to display and what order to put them in, so there’s rarely going to be a case where you have to manually list the links for the menu. I wrote a post about how to rearrange your page menu recently- there are whole host of ways to customize your page menu through the list-pages tag.
I would say the one place you might want to have comments on pages is if you have released a theme and it has it’s own page- it’s a nice place to manage support questions and resolutions.
Cant you change the order of the pages without doing it manually?? I do this myself at the moment but it is kinder clumsy and only an option for technically knowledgeable people.
I would also think that you could get a plugin (maybe widgets on WP 2.2) that would allow you to do this…
I think this is one option that is limiting WP becoming the best CMS.
@ Randa Clay
thanks Randa for the link. Sure, using the wp_list_pages template tag allow greater flexibility where you don’t have to manually hand-code things each time and I pointed at the article from theme playground that were describing those template tags in detail. Great tip too for using comments on theme support page but I tried having a post itself for the theme and later a single page that will group all the themes like I’ve done it from my navigation bar. I found that way easier.
@ Jermayn
sure check out the different template tags you use to achieve the results you want here.
yeah I think that would be a nice feature too, like dragging and dropping to position the pages like we want, save it and there you are , pages listed like you want them. Great idea. Perhaps in future release of Wordpress, they could be giving this a try.
[…] Things you should know when displaying pages in Wordpress: quick guide on things Wordpress users should be knowing with listing Pages. […]
[…] Things you should know when displaying pages in Wordpress […]
Of your last posts, this one is the most interesting… for me. Greetings, Mariana Cuentos.
[…] Things you should know when displaying pages in Wordpress […]
[…] Things you should know when displaying pages in Wordpress […]
[…] Things you should know when displaying pages in Wordpress: quick guide on things Wordpress users should be knowing with listing Pages. […]
[…] Things you should know when displaying pages in Wordpress: quick guide on things Wordpress users should be knowing with listing Pages. […]
[…] Things you should know when displaying pages in Wordpress: quick guide on things Wordpress users should be knowing with listing Pages. […]
[…] Things you should know when displaying pages in Wordpress is a quick guide on things Wordpress users should know with listing Pages. […]
Strange how you did that in MyJournal, ’twas a battle to make it work as I wished.
[…] Things you should know when displaying pages in Wordpress: quick guide on things Wordpress users should be knowing with listing Pages. […]