Create a dynamic page listing widget

Hi Everyone! It’s been a while since my last tutorial, so here’s a quick bit of code I want to share, since I’ve found myself using it a lot.

For sites that have a large number of pages setup hierarchically, adding them all to the drop-down menu doesn’t make sense. Same with just adding the pages widget to the sidebar, since anything more than a few pages quickly becomes overwhelming. The best happy-medium I’ve found so far is to display pages that have the same parent as the current page in a list in the sidebar.

function pages_sidebar() { if(is_page()) { ?> <!-- Show only on single pages -->
  <li id="pages_widget" class="widget">
    <?php
    global $post;  // Get the post information for the current page
    if($post->post_parent)    // Check to see what the page's parent is
    $children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->post_parent."&echo=0&depth=1"); else    // List child pages of page's parent
    $children = wp_list_pages("title_li=&child_of=".$post->ID."&echo=0&depth=1");   // List child pages of current page
    if ($children) { ?>
      <h3>Related Pages</h3>   <!-- Widget title -->
      <ul>
        <?php echo $children; ?>   <!-- Echo queried pages -->
      </ul>
    <?php } ?>
  </li>
<?php } }

Once you add that to your custom_functions.php file, you can then hook it in to your desired position. I use

add_action('thesis_hook_before_sidebar_1', 'pages_sidebar');

But any hook will do. From there, you can use CSS to style the widget however you like.