Web Citizen Magazine

When creating the page section of a client site in WordPress, the need for breadcrumb navigation often arises.  There are probably multiple methods/plugins that can do this, but the one I use is “Fold Page List“.

Fold Page List, is a plugin that primarily adds some enhanced functionality to the wp_list_pages() function, but a neat side feature is that is also creates a new function called wswwpx_page_breadcrumbs() which lets you very easily create breadcrumb navigation.

The parameters for the function are really quite simple. After the plugin is installed, the function should be used as follows…

wswwpx_page_breadcrumbs($homelink, $separator, $echo);

And the default values are as follows…

• $homelink: array(’label’=>’Home’, ‘title’=>’Homepage’, ‘link’=>’/’)
• $separator: string(’ » ’)
• $echo: boolean (true)

So an example of how to use this….

<?php

$homepage_url = get_bloginfo('url');

wswwpx_page_breadcrumbs(array('label'=>'Home', 'title'=>'Homepage',
'link'=>"$homepage_url")); 

?>

And that outputs a breadcrumb (using default values for $separator) in the format of…

Home » Page » Subpage

Cool! To download the plugin and see full information please visit the author’s page here .

Really thought there would be a built-in function in WordPress to check for the existence of  any subpages while on a parent page, but apparently not.

So here’s a quick dirty little function that will do just that. Drop this in your functions.php file…

function has_subpage (){

global $post;
$pages = get_pages("sort_column=menu_order&child_of={$post->;ID}");
if ($pages) return TRUE;

}

And then you can use the function as such…

if (is_page() && has_subpage()) {

/* Do something special to pages that have children */

}

I recently needed to slightly modify the output for a specific entry inside a category loop on a client’s WordPress install. Having a terrible memory, I seem to always forget functions for basic things like this, and this case was no exception.

A few keystrokes in Google, and I was quickly reminded that WordPress does in fact have a built in function that returns the ID inside the loop –> get_the_ID

And using it is simple as…

<?php

$id = get_the_ID();
if($id == 2817): ?>

 /* Do Something Special Here */

<?php endif; ?>;

*There is also the_ID() which *displays* the ID inside the loop, but that’s not what I was after, since I needed to run a conditional check for a specific post

I also was reminded that if I didn’t want to use the WordPress built-in function, I could just grab the ID from the global $post object. So this conditional works as well…

<?php if($post->ID == 2817): ?>

*Depending on how/where you do it, you may have to declare the $post variable as global before this works. Example:

<?php

global $post;
if($post->ID == 2817): ?>

 /* Do Something Special Here */

<?php endif; ?>

You may be wondering why you would ever need to modify the output for a specific post that’s moving through the loop and I agree, this is not something you’ll probably have to do very often.

But imagine a situation where you are using the WordPress post/category paradigm in an abnormal fashion…for example, a list of people/profiles sorted by name and not date. (I’ve done this many times on client sites).

Perhaps there is one person..maybe the CEO who needs a little extra spizazz on his entry in the category loop (perhaps different/more custom fields, additional images etc etc).

Using this conditional allows me to modify the template for his specific entry very quickly without too much fuss.

Also, I should point out, if what you want to do is purely visual (as opposed to modifying the actual HTML output as I needed to do) you’re much better of using some plain ol’ CSS.

By default every entry in the loop should have a custom #id attached to it in the html. So, for a specific entry, if you just need to just change colors, change size, add borders, emphasize text etc etc….probably best to do that in your CSS file without even touching PHP to add extra markup.

#post-2817 { border: 2px solid black; }

WordPress is probably my goto CMS platform (yes I said CMS) for client work in my day-to-day gig (full-time web designer/developer). Needless to say, since I use it so much, I’m stoked that the feature-packed WordPress 3.0 is upon us.

Unfortunately, I’ve been so busy that up until recently I haven’t been able to really follow along the nightly build/beta releases, but I have been salivating for custom post types for a long, long time. So much so, that I’ve used Expression Engine (with far better implementation of custom posts/custom fields) quite a bit as an alternative for clients.

Alas WordPress 3.0 is right around the corner and I’ve toyed around with the vaunted custom post type feature a bit, and although not nearly as polished as the Expression Engine implementation, it is a very powerful step forward for the WordPress platform. Aside from the fact that there’s no real admin UI as of yet (*cough* Expression Engine *cough*) the first thing that really raised an eyebrow was figuring out where exactly to put these new, peculiar post types.

It was apparent after scouring a few blogs, that once setting up the custom post type in the functions.php file, that I could modify any loop by simply adding a parameter to the WP Query ie…

global $wp_query;

$wp_query = new WP_Query("post_type=your_post_type&posts_per_page=5");

Cool…easy peasey…

BUT…what wasn’t apparent was how to create a landing page just for a specific post type, one that was accessible by a unique URL (ie yourblog.com/your_post_type).

Before the big jump to WordPress 3.0 I would use categories primarily for the major sections of the clients’ sites, and of course WP has always had an easy to understand template hierarchy that lets you create unique templates for different categories, and lets those categories become accessible by very pretty permalinks, if so desired.

I really didn’t see anything in the currently sparse 3.0 documentation that explained how to do something similar for custom post types. Hmm…

So I did a little more scouring and I found out that I’m not the only one who found this implementation (or should I say “lack of implementation”) a little confusing.  Over on Justin Tadlock’s blog, I found someone raise similar concerns, and Justin’s response to it. http://justintadlock.com/archives/2010/04/29/custom-post-types-in-wordpress#comment-188177

Interestingly enough, not only did that someone find the custom post type implementation lacking…they actually wrote a helper class to try and make up for it. (Wow…I was just content with complaining about it…so kudos to him). To learn more about that helper class see: Smarter Custom Post Types in WordPress 3.0

Going back to the original discussion at Justin Tadlock’s blog, the alternative solution suggested by Justin himself, was to drop the modified custom post type loop on a custom page template. This actually was the way I started doing it initially, but it felt a little hackish for such an acclaimed new feature. (But apparently since there isn’t an unhackish way of doing it yet, I’m adopting this method for the time being.)

Also interestingly, there’s some debate as to whether pagination and site feeds will work on this new  “custom post type on a custom page template landing page” (that’s a mouthful). Honestly I haven’t dug into it to much yet, but I’ll be sure to update this post if and when I find out more about that.

My take away from this…the custom post types in WordPress 3.0, although great, are still a work in progress.

UPDATE: I’ve found a couple more solutions both of which seem to take the basic concept of creating your own archive/landing template for a post-type and making the URL map to the correct place through hacking/modifying of  WP’s rewrite rules. Here is a cool write up about it from Ballyhoo Blog ,  and another post from kovshenin.com where the author briefly hints at using the “$wp_rewrite->add_permastruct()” method to achieve the desired effect.