Stephanie Leary

Writer and WordPress consultant

  • Books
    • Content Strategy for WordPress (2015)
    • WordPress for Web Developers (2013)
    • Beginning WordPress 3 (2010)
  • Blog
    • Fascism Watch (2016-17)
    • Content Modeling for WordPress series
    • WordPress Hidden Gems series
  • Work
    • Portfolio
    • Services
    • WordPress Plugins
    • WordPress Themes
    • Presentations and Interviews
    • on GitHub →
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Call a navigation menu using a shortcode

July 13, 2010 Stephanie Leary 48 Comments

Today I came across a weird situation: I needed to place a navigation menu in the content of a page. A shortcode was the obvious solution, but there doesn't appear to be one built in for menus. I created this one very quickly: Place this in functions.php, then use [menu … [Read more...]

WordPress Navigation, shortcodes

Listing children on empty pages as a filter

June 3, 2010 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

Yesterday, I showed you how to automatically list child pages if a page's content is empty. That code would go in your theme's page.php file. What if you wanted to use it in any theme? The best solution is to turn it into a little plugin: Paste the code into a file in your … [Read more...]

WordPress Navigation, Posts and Pages

Including external links in WordPress navigation menus

August 11, 2009 Stephanie Leary 2 Comments

Sometimes you need to link to something other than a WordPress page in your navigation menu. Perhaps you've built a photo gallery in ZenPhoto. How do you get it into your menu without hand-coding all your links? The Page Links To plugin allows you to do just that. Install the … [Read more...]

WordPress menus, Navigation, Permalinks

Listing child pages

August 9, 2009 Stephanie Leary 2 Comments

The Codex offers a way to list the children of the current page by adding this to your theme: … [Read more...]

WordPress Navigation, pages, Posts and Pages, template tags

Ordering pages

August 7, 2009 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

Ordering pages in WordPress is a huge pain. The developers acknowledge this with a little message on the Edit Page screen: "We know this is a little janky, it'll be better in future releases." The Quick Edit feature makes it a little easier, but you still have to edit lots of … [Read more...]

WordPress menus, Navigation, page order

Previous and Next links for pages

July 5, 2009 Stephanie Leary Leave a Comment

Ever want to let your visitors browse your pages in order? You've probably discovered that previous_posts_link and next_posts_link don't work on pages. I've written a plugin, Next Page, to solve the problem. You'll get an options screen allowing you to specify the language of … [Read more...]

WordPress Navigation, page order, Permalinks

Fascism Watch

The Fascism Watch is a daily(ish) news roundup. View all the previous Fascism Watch posts »

Latest WordPress Book

Content Strategy for WordPress

A short book for content strategists and managers on implementing a complete content strategy in WordPress: evaluation, analysis, content modeling, editing and workflows, and long-term planning and maintenance.

Read the sample chapter

Kindle Nook iBooks Kobo Smashwords

WordPress for Web Developers

WordPress for Web Developers (9781430258667)

This is a book for professional web designers and developers who already know HTML and CSS, and want to learn to build sites with WordPress. The book begins with a detailed tour of the administration screens and settings, then digs into server-side topics like performance and security. The second half of the book is devoted to development: learning to build WordPress themes and plugins.

This is the second, much-revised and updated edition of Beginning WordPress 3, with a more accurate title. Everything’s been updated for WordPress 3.6.

WordPress for Web Developers is out now. See what's inside...

The best WordPress features you’ve never noticed

  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Screen Options
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Bulk Edit
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Private Status
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Dashboard Feed Readers
  • WordPress Hidden Gems: Options.php

Content Modeling for WordPress series

  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 1: analyze content
  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 2: functional and organizational requirements
  • Content modeling for WordPress, part 3: a sample content model

This is an excerpt from Content Strategy for WordPress.My latest books are Content Strategy for WordPress (2015) and WordPress for Web Developers (2013). Sign up to be notified when I have a new book for you.

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