Show child menu items on left side of page template

govfresh / govpress

The WordPress theme for government

https://wordpress.org/themes/govpress/

GNU General Public License v2.0

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Show child menu items on left side of page template #24

Closed devinsays closed 10 years ago

devinsays commented 10 years ago

This was a feature in the original version of the theme that @lukefretwell thinks will be useful for government websites.

We should autodetect if a page has children. If so, display the as a menu on the left.
Add an option so that it can be turned off universally.
Add an option to it can be turned off on a per page basis.

lukefretwell commented 10 years ago

See left sidebar here: http://wp.govfresh.com/docs/

devinsays commented 10 years ago

I'm looking at the original implementation again and think this might need a little more thought. In the original, it is not possible to have sidebar widgets- which I think users might want for pages, especially in cases where there are no children pages.

There are widgets (I haven't tested them) to auto display child pages: http://wordpress.org/plugins/child-page-navigation/

That would give the user the option of displaying them or not. If they put it at the top of the widget area, it would auto-display when a page had children elements.

Other options/features would be to:

Create a different widget area for pages. If it was not filled, it could auto-fill with the widgets from the standard sidebar.
Create post meta layout options, so pages could either have a right sidebar or left sidebar on a by page basis

lukefretwell commented 10 years ago

One design challenge is that there are so many subpages that would cause the standard sidebar to be overwhelming.

See: http://www.cityofdeleon.org/government/

That's why I kept this page simple to just a left subnav.

Would the plugin you suggest force folks to select for each page? My fear is that they'd forget.

devinsays commented 10 years ago

Users would just need to set the widget once:

"This plugin provides the "Child Page Navigation" widget, which will list all of the pages which are childs to the current page. If there are no child pages, the widget will not show."

Another option would be a page templates. We could have it default to the children being listed on the left, but they could switch it back using a "Page - Sidebar Right" template.

lukefretwell commented 10 years ago

The latter works for me. Think it's more of a content issue than layout. Having it in there as a standard seems better than pushing users to an additional plugin. Don't have strong feelings either way.

devinsays commented 10 years ago

Would you mind testing this @lukefretwell and confirm it works as you were expecting?