THE DREAM IN ACTION

I don’t normally post a bunch about WordPress hacks, but since this caused me trouble for so long I thought I’d go against that norm. These 3 plugins have really made the menu on this blog simple and easy to manage. I highly recommend adding them to your plugin army and make WP that much better. Just like the apps to the iPhone, plugins are what make the WordPress platform so rock solid. No more custom hacking, just plug and play simplicity and they even work if you change themes.

The Exclude Pages Plugin

Exclude Pages handles the problem of all your top-level pages being thrown into your navigation. It simply adds a check box to the Edit Page screen that lets you choose not to include the page in user menus. Brilliant.

The Page Menu Editor Plugin

Page Menu Editor adds a new Meta Box to the Edit Page screen letting you choose a new Page Menu Label. What this means is this: you can have a different (usually simpler) title for your menu link than the actual title on the page. This is the number 1 reason why I usually hand code my menus. Again, brilliant.

In addition, Page Menu Editor also lets you add a custom title attribute. Also kind of cool.

The Page Links To Plugin

Page Links To lets you add a link to say, an external non-WordPress forum, or an external non-WordPress photo gallery, by publishing a new blank page like forum, or gallery, and then choosing to link it to another page. Also useful for adding an RSS link to your header without having to code anything.