ClioWeb Blog Archive » Listing Pages with WordPress

For you WordPress geeks out there: I’ve recently had the need to list the child pages of a particular page in addition to listing those same pages once you visit a child page. In this case, I only have one level of child pages. So, my page structure looked like this:

Main Page
- Subpage One
- Subpage Two
- Subpage Three

You’d want to list the same subpages on both the Main Page and the respective subpages. I came up with a simple solution. First, we need to query the post to get its information. So I set up a PHP variable $page and set it equal to $wp_query->post;. Then a create another variable called $parent_id and do a database query to get the ID of the $page variable’s post_parent. Of course, if $parent_id is empty, then that means the page has no parent, and is thus a Main Page. So, for this case, I throw in a simple if check that will set an empty $parent_id to the page’s ID, which is found using $post->ID. The full script for finding this info, which I put in the <head>, is:

<?php
$page = $wp_query->post;
$parent_id = $wpdb->get_var(“SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE ID = ‘$page->post_parent;’”);
if(!$parent_id) $parent_id = $post->ID;
?>

Then, to actually generate the HTML for the page list, I use the following code in the body of my page template:

<?php if(wp_list_pages(“child_of=”.$parent_id.”&echo=0″)): ?>
<ul id=”subnav”>
<?php
wp_list_pages(“title_li=&child_of=”.$parent_id.”&depth=1″);
?>
</ul>
<?php endif; ?>

In a nutshell, the second part of the script does two things. First, an if statement checks to see if there are in fact subpages for the page’s value for $parent_id. That’s the <?php if(wp_list_pages("child_of=".$parent_id."&echo=0")): ?> line. So, if a page doesn’t have subpages, it won’t generate the unordered list. Remember, if the page is a Main Page, $parent_id is the page’s ID (see the explanation above). Second, if the first check goes through, then the script will generate the list of pages using the wp_list_pages() WordPress template function, using the $parent_id in its argument for child_of. For more info on how the wp_list_pages() works, see the WordPress Codex page Template Tags/WP List Pages.

There might be better solutions for this kind of problem, but I thought I’d share it and see if there are ways to improve the scripts. It’s working pretty well for me, and I think there are multiple ways to use this kind of page query to make page-specific additions to your site. I do need to come up with a solution for multiple levels of pages (two or more levels deep). If anyone has thoughts on that, please leave a comment!

Listing Pages with WordPress

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