Site navigation with wp_list_pages() lacks some fundamental elements

[markjaquith]

Home Links

If you have a WP page acting as your site's front page, it will have a place in the wp_list_pages() navigational system. If you have your blog as your front page, no such link will exist.

To solve this, you have to either use a plugin (like my "Page Links To" plugin) to make a WP page point to a specific URL, or you have to hardcode the link into the <ul / This is inflexible for several reasons:

• the home link must be either first or last
• theme must be edited
• theme authors have to include logic for "page as front page" to know whether or not to hardcode the link

Nav links to non-WP pages

Next is the issue of linking to non-WP pages on your site (or on other sites) from within your wp_list_pages() Many people have forums, photo galleries or other portions of the site that are not WP powered, but should be linked to from within the navigational structure.

I'd like to move this functionality into WordPress core for 2.2

Here is how I see it working:

• New DBX for pages that says something like "This page should link to [itself|another WP page|the front page|specified URL]" (dropdown). If "another WP pagae" is selected, a dropdown of the pages will appear next to it. if "specified URL" is elected, a textbox will appear next to it for URL typing.

This would enable people's navigational structure to be theme-independent.

The next thing that could be moved into core is a way to mark a page as hidden... pages that shouldn't appear in wp_list_pages easy to do now that we have a filter for global page excludes.

[Denis-de-Bernardy]

there is a menu template tag now, and multitudes of plugins that deal with this.