If your WordPress blog has a navigation or top menu bar that shows all your WordPress pages and you create a lot of pages this can become quite cluttered. You can change this to specify the pages or links displayed from within your WordPress themes template files. This WordPress Guide shows how to specify WordPress navigation page links.

First your themes files need to be writable in order to edit them from within the WordPress dashboard or you will need to edit the file and upload it with an FTP client. From within the WordPress dashboard click Presentation then Theme Editor. On the right side of the theme editor click Header to open the header.php file. Depending on your theme you should see some code that looks like this:

<div id="top-menu">
<ul>
<li><a <?php if (is_home()) echo('class="current" '); ?>href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>">Home</a></li>
<?php wp_list_pages(’depth=1&title_li=’); ?>

</ul> </div>

The piece of code that shows the pages is in red. This is showing all pages you create and doing so can cause that list to grow quite large. You can just remove that code and hard code the actual pages you want in that area.

If you are a not familiar with editing WordPress themes make sure to copy all the code in the file and save it so you can restore any mistakes you might make!

Now just remove the bit of code in read and replace it with a regular HTML formatted code like this:

<div id="top-menu">
<ul>
<li><a <?php if (is_home()) echo('class="current" ');
?>href="<?php bloginfo('url'); ?>">Home</a></li>
<a href="http://www.TheURL.com/" title="Page
Title Here">Page Title Here</a>
<a href="http://www.TheURL.com/" title="Page
Title Here">Page Title Here</a>
</ul> </div>

If you copy the above code to use it on your site and doesn’t work check for the proper format of all the quotes ” I tried to format them so they come through properly but may have missed one! To replace the curly quotes ” with regular ones just remove them and simply retype them again.

(I really need a good plugin to show raw HTML and PHP code in posts)

Now you can specify the exact page, or any URL for that matter simply by hard coding it directly into your WordPress header.php file.

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Filed In: WordPress Guide //