Sillybean

Page Attributes: Parents, Templates, and Order

You can arrange your pages into filesystem-like hierarchies by making them children of parent pages (Figure 4-19). In the Attributes box on any single page’s Edit screen, you’ll be able to select another existing page as the parent. That page could, in turn, have another parent, and so on.

Figure 4-19. Pages arranged in a parent/child hierarchy.

If you’ve turned on permalinks, your page’s URL will be built by adding its slug to that of its parent and any other page ancestors, as shown in Figure 4-20.

Figure 4-20. The slug of a page with a parent

As you’ll see in Chapter 6, WordPress themes can have multiple templates for pages. When you create a new page template, it becomes available as an option in the parent dropdown portion of the Page Attributes box (Figure 4-21). To use your new template instead of the default page template, select it here and update the page.

Figure 4-21. Page Attributes

The page order determines how your pages are listed in navigation menus. Numbering them using this field is a bit like programming in BASIC; inevitably, you’ll find that you need to insert a new page between two existing ones, and then you’ll have to redo the numbering for all the pages. To avoid the problem, you can use a numbering scheme that leaves you plenty of room between pages (111, 222, 333, etc.). If you prefer, there are plugins that provide a drag-and-drop screen where you can rearrange your pages without having to count. My Page Order (Figure 4-22) and pageMash (Figure 4-23) are two of the best.

Figure 4-22. My Page Order

Figure 4-23. PageMash