WordPress: Flexible Pages Lists With The Extended Page List Plugin

Inayaili León — Sun, 17 Jan 2010 08:00:32 +0000

WordPress is quite versatile and easy to use, but it seems to fail in some features that should be present at its core, like the ability to list pages’ content easier. Here’s an explanation of how to use a little plugin I found recently, and that doesn’t seem to be that widely known or documented.

Me, the designer

As I’ve said here before, eve though I’m not a complete beginner, my knowledge of WordPress is fairly limited. I’m essentially a front-end person, so the less I have to dive into PHP and the likes, the better. My goal is to always find a balance between flexible code and simplicity.

If, by the end of the post, you feel this could be easily done with another technique, feel free to leave a comment.

My problem

I needed to display the list of a certain page’s sub-pages, along with an excerpt from those pages. Very simple, right?

After some searches on Google and within the Codex, there didn’t seem to be a simple solution — that’s when Andrew pointed me to the Extended Page List plugin.

How to use the plugin

First step: install the plugin.

The plugin uses a shortcode ([epl]) that you can add directly into your posts, and customise with some parameters. It overrides the get_pages() function, so you can use all of get_pages() parameters, plus a few more.

When editing a page, you would use something like this:

[epl showexcerpt=1]

But I needed to add the plugin to a template, to be used on a number of pages. The client was going to be able to edit the introductory text on each parent page, but the list of sub-pages should be generated automatically bellow that.

So I used the do_shortcode function on my template file. Its Codex page is not that useful.

This function allows you to call a shortcode and use it just as you would use it within a post (or page). So I could now do this:

As you may notice, I used many of the parameters supported by the plugin to control what was displayed on the page. That’s one of the things I love about this plugin — the flexibility. You can control everything, from the excerpt’s length, to the HTML element that you want wrapping the whole block, or each page, which CSS class to apply, etc.

Done!

And that’s all! I decided to put this little post together, since I didn’t find any documentation on how to use this plugin within a template file — the plugin’s website itself doesn’t seem to mention it. And, although it may be clear to many people, it wasn’t for me.

WordPress: How To Display Multiple Values of a Custom Field Key

inayaili — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 08:22:31 +0000

In one of my recent adventures with WordPress I came across the need of having one or more custom fields values listed in one page. In my case, I wanted to list press quotes from theatre performances.

This is quite simple and useful, so I decided to write a quick post that may be useful to someone else.

Assumptions

I’m assuming you’re familiar with WordPress, so I’ll just skip the part where I’m supposed to explain how great custom fields are and how they add so much value and power to WP. It’s all true, but this is a “quick post”.

My requirements

As I mentioned, I needed to list quotes from the press for a specific theatre perfomance. Some performances had no quotes at all, while others had several. I also didn’t want to see the “Press Quotes” title, unless there were quotes. So my short list of requirements was something like this:

Check if there are any custom fields in the post.
If not, show nothing.
If there are, echo the list of values, but not inside
tags (which is the default behavior if you use get_post_meta()). I want my values to be listed inside a
and a
, to be semantically correct.

The code

I’ll assume we’re working within The Loop here, so wherever you’re adding this code to, it should be contained within something that may look like this:

Inside the Loop, add this bit of code:

ID, "pressquote", false);
if ($press_quotes[0]=="") { ?>






	From the Press

	'.$press_quotes.'';
	} ?>

This is all you need to know:

$press_quotes: This is the variable that will store the value of each custom field. Replace by whatever suits you best (that’ll be 5 times in this code).
$press_quotes = get_post_meta($post->ID, "pressquote", false): pressquote is the actual Key of my custom field, as you can see in the image bellow:

If there are no custom fields, the code will echo a handful of nothing (or my little comment).

If there are, I’m showing the h3 tag with my pretty tittle, everything within a convenient div, for placement.

Then, I have to say what I want to repeat for each value (for each quote, in my case). So I write exactly that after the “echo” bit:

''.$press_quotes.''

Make sure to add the repeated HTML code within ‘ ‘ and the variable within . .

It’s as simple as that!

It may not be the only (nor the better) way of doing it, but it’s easy enough and it works. Let me know if you have any other methods!

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