Another Step In hiding or excluding WordPress Pages

It has been maybe a year since I last wrote the script for hiding pages in WordPress.  Now, I’m rebooting one of the blog themes on an old site and I need to break out some skills that have grown a little stale. Its kind of like when you go through a corporate relocation and have to go back through the process of configuring your voice mail and can’t quite remember what you used to know how to do.

So I need to hide some of the pages (not posts) that appear in the menu section of my new blog theme.

For example maybe you have an About page and a Policy page and you do not want the Policy page to show up as a menu button in your theme, so you exclude it from the call so that only the About button shows up in the menu.  Then you put a simple little link to the policy page in the footer of your website as is customary for many sites.

I did a quick search and came up with an article by the Realivent, real estate marketing blog of all places. 

Its kind of cool to have some many Davinci types in the world these days that have so many talents! 

Anyway the article I found actually offered up some script that essentially seems to install a plugin or something in WordPress so that you can hide pages at a global level.  That was definitely interesting, but over kill for what I was looking for.

But in that article the writer, Matt, mentioned covering several examples in the past.  This time he updated it with ways to both exclude specific pages and to include specific pages.

I was in the market for excluding and jumped over to his older article and found this:

The last way is to hardcode your menu function. Wordpress created the menu with this function: wp_list_pages();
You can either remove that function and add your own links, or add the “exclude” argument to wp_list_pages() like so:
wp_list_pages(exclude=17,38);

How to hide Pages in wordpress

Now that code if I am not mistaken has an error in it.  The exclude section should have quotes around it and should look like this (I think Matt corrected this in his second article, but I couldn’t follow his train of thought to see if he actually did or didn’t fix it.  He mentions fixing it, but I do not see the big red arrow pointing to an example of the fix.

(‘exclude=17,38′)

My Addition to this coding Saga

I had to make a few special additions to the code and I’d thought I offer up my own examples in case anyone else runs into having to combine the exclude or include commands for pages into a line of code that already has other commands running in it.

Before I started I had this in my list_pages line

<?php wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li='); ?>

After I added the exclude command (with an ‘&’ sign) it looked like this

<?php wp_list_pages('exclude=467&sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li='); ?>

Plus, I added my menu to the bottom of my site, but this time I included ALL pages.

<?php wp_list_pages('include=467,465,466,611,2&sort_column=menu_order&depth=1&title_li='); ?>