Managing Pages in WordPress: A Wish List
I’m a big fan of WordPress. Sure it has it’s quirks, and no doubt there are probably better platforms out there, but overall it’s really a fantastic a publishing platform. Lately I’ve used WordPress for nearly every freelance site I launch, no matter how small. Out of the box I get clean urls, search functionality, a fairly flexible templating system, and an enormous community of developers behind it.
The biggest value however is giving my clients some control over the website after the project is done. I have little interest in maintaining someone else’s website on an ongoing basis, so putting some basic tools in their hands is a win for both of us.
None of this would be possible if it weren’t for the ability to create pages in WordPress. Pages are just like a blog post except for two key differences:
- Pages can exist outside of the normal post chronology
- Pages can be mapped to their own page template
That means that WordPress can be used as light CMS with very little work. Here is an example of the page structure for a recent site I built:
Click to enlarge
Every page in the site is represented here, even if I don’t actually use WordPress to manage the content. I do this because I can easily use WordPress’s wp_list_pages to dynamically generate navigation and menus.
Because I’m managing nearly all of the website content inside pages, and relying on their structure to dynamically generate my navigation, there are three things that I need to do for nearly every page: map the page to a template, define the page parent, and set the page sort-order. Unfortunately, these are all really clunky to do.
Why so clunky? You have to actually be inside the page do set all of these options. Even with a small site of just about 15 pages - you can quickly find yourself frustrated. Second, the page parent and page sort-order are really out of context here. Both of these options are about the page in the context of all of the other pages.
A Simple Idea
A simple way to remedy this situation would be to surface these options at the page management level.
Click to enlarge
All I did was move the template select menu, and the sort field to the page overview. To change the page order you simply click and change it in the text field (or bonus: drag and drop to re-order).
By surfacing these options at the top, you save a click and a long scroll to manage these common options (that in many cases, you need to modify for every page).
Wade Winningham said:
Have you checked out the developer preview for 2.7? I don’t think it does everything you want, but it does some of it. Check out the Quick Edit link, which allows you to change some of those settings directly in the page list view.
Nathan Shipley said:
Why would say Habari is probably better? Would that apply for a casual blogger like me? Just curious.
Travis Isaacs said:
@Nathan -
Habari is a platform developed by some of the original WordPress developers. They took the best parts of WordPress and made it better. Both are excellent platforms with features that even a casual blogger can take advantage of.
Blog Archive » Follow Up: Editing Pages in WordPress 2.7Travis Isaacs | My Life In Pixels said:
[…] Last week I noted that editing pages - specifically changing a page’s sort order, parent, and template - are particularly cumbersome in the current 2.6x release. I suggested the simple alternative would be to simply expose these common functions on the page manager itself, as well as offer drag-and-drop page re-order to set the page sort order. […]