The other day I did some work for a client. They were using a free theme and wanted a static home page.
I had the hardest time with this! I went into Dashboard/Settings/Reading and selected “Static Page”. Then I told it which page. (I had already created it.)
This was great EXCEPT now I had “Home” and “Home2″ (a fictitious name) in my navigation bar. AHHH!!!
Two pages with the exact same content!
I went into Dashboard/Pages/Edit and set Home2 to private. That worked for a while, but WordPress has a mind of its own, and by the next day, both home pages were back.
By then I realized I would have to do it the old fashioned way: go into the code. So, I started Googling for directions. But it seems the newer themes and the premium (paid) themes, have a settings page where you can go in and set which pages you want to show in your nav bar. The information wasn’t easy to find. But when I did find it, it didn’t work. AHHH again!!!
And somewhere in my research I stumbled on this, and it was so SIMPLE. Why hadn’t I thought of that?
There is a plugin called “Exclude Pages“. It was written by Simon Wheatley and can be found here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/exclude-pages/
This plugin adds a checkbox, “include this page in menus”, which is checked by default. If you uncheck it, the page will not appear in any listings of pages (which includes, and is usually limited to, your page navigation menus).
Pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings. (An alert in the editing screen, underneath the “include” checkbox allows you to track down which ancestor page is affecting child pages in this way.)
So, ladies and gentlemen, don’t struggle with code if you’re trying to manage your navigation bar, download the “Exclude Pages” WordPress plugin.
When you create your page, look for this little box over to the right.
Of course, this means that every time you create a page that you DO want in the nav bar, you will have to remember to check here. But it sure beats the alternative when you DON’T want it up there!
Someone once told me there was a WordPress plugin for everything, I should have believed him.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Deborah,
I have had this same problem and downloaded the plugin. I still could not find where I had to configure the setting to exclude the pages.
Now having gone over your article, I now know how. Thanks Craig
Hi Craig,
Glad I could help, and thanks for the comment.
Debbie