Excluding Pages In WordPress

One of the annoying things that I dislike about WordPress is the inability to exclude certain pages that I create from showing up in the navigation area of my theme. Granted, I could manually exclude these pages via the wp_list_pages template tag but that is a bit mundane.

Introducing Exclude Pages. This plugin written by Simon Wheatley is exactly what the doctor ordered. Once installed, a check box is added to the page creation/editing panel. If selected, the page will be included in the navigation and other user menus. If unchecked, the page is excluded from not only the navigation menus, but on other menus you may have such as in the sidebar. That doesn’t mean you won’t be able to hard link to those items for sidebar usage.

Although the official plugin page states that the plugin is compatible up to version 2.5, I gave it a try on my local install of WordPress 2.6.2 and it worked without a hitch. Perhaps at some point in the future, we’ll be able to create specific navigation links or separate navigation from actual pages without the need to exclude page IDs.

Let me know in the comments if this tip helped you out and if you would like to see more posts like these in the future.

7 thoughts on “Excluding Pages In WordPress

  1. i am in favor of this one.. it s much more accessible to have page exclusions since we no longer have to do it manually. great information.

  2. @Lucy: Glad to hear that I saved you some time. Like you, I was getting tired of manually putting in the code for new WordPress installs.

    @Kathy: You’re quite welcome. I like what Thesis is capable of doing but yeah, this plugin opens the door for everyone else.

    @Brandon: Yeah. Nice and simple. People love simple!

    @Ajith: Currently, I have the manual exclusions on my own blog but in the future, I’ll be using this plugin instead.

    @Sarbjit: Right. Since the same function is called in two different places, blocking the ID from one will block it from the other.

  3. I read about this after seeing it on my dashboard and downloaded it instantly. It works well and I think I found just what I was looking for.

    It is perfect if you are using a theme like “Statement” where pages are listed in both header and the footer. You wont have to add page ids at two places.

  4. This is definitely a useful plugin. I had to do this thing for two of my pages but ended up editing the theme code to achieve the same by hardcoding page numbers there… It’s a pity that I did not think of converting this into a plugin

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