Parent Highlight when Subpage is showing

I was able to keep highlights on the parent pages’ menu while viewing subpages by hardcoding pages’ IDs into the menu:

<a <?php
if (is_page('2')) {
echo "class=\"current\"";
} elseif (is_page('3')) {
echo "class=\"current\"";
} elseif (is_page('4')) {
echo "class=\"current\"";
}
// and so on
?>

This is not the best solution, I guess, but as a non-pro I couldn’t find another. If there is a better way to make this work (especially with lots of subpages), it would be realy great to know.

Guess I found a better solution, having re-read the Conditional Tags article from the Codex. ?? I’m using it in the a tag, since putting it in the li tag doesn’t work for me:

<a if ( is_page('') && $post->post_parent ) {
echo "class=\"current\"";
} elseif (is_page('5')) {
echo "class=\"current\"";
} else {
// display nothing
}
?> href="some_link_fetching_tag_here">

If li tags works for your template, you can put this code in it:

<li if ( is_page('') && $post->post_parent ) {
echo "class=\"current\"";
} elseif (is_page('5')) {
echo "class=\"current\"";
} else {
// display nothing
}
?>>

This piece of script is obviously looking to see whether the page displaying is a subpage of a page which id you’ve specified in the line 3, and if it is it adds a special class to the link. If it is that page itself, it also adds a special class to the link. If it’s some other page, it does nothing.

The downside is that you can’t use it with a dynamic menu which is built automatically. I’m building the menu by hand, so it works okay for me. Probably there are other ways to achieve what you need.

Hi, I finally used this and it rocks:

<ul class=”menu”>

• <span>Blog</span>

<?php echo preg_replace(‘@\<li([^>^]*)>\<a([^>^]*)>(.*?)\<\/a>@i’,'<li$1><a$2><span>$3</span>’ ,wp_list_pages(‘echo=0&depth=1&title_li=’));?>

Thank you, sergislevas, your code was exactly what I wanted. That’s the best solution I’ve found for a dynamic menu.