How can I show links to previous/next Page by menu_order

Hi Chris,

Unfortunately I don’t have a good solution; I’m actually in the same boat as you are in terms of wanting to cycle through my ordered WP Pages using next/previous links. I wanted to bump your thread in case there is anybody out there with a solution; one would think like this would be a pretty common thing to do.

As a quick and dirty (and hopefully temporary) solution, I’ve started to store the next and previous post IDs in the custom fields. The downside is that I have to change these fields as well as the page order whenever I add a page.

Thanks for posting this, and hopefully we can find some answers!

Cheers,
David

I actually got this working — sort of. Here’s the code:

<?php
$posts = get_posts("post_type='page'&amp;post_status='publish'&amp;numberposts=99999&amp;orderby=menu_order");
$pages = get_page_hierarchy($posts);
//print_r($pages);
$pages = array_keys($pages);

$current = array_search($post->ID, $pages);
$prevID = $pages[$current-1];
$nextID = $pages[$current+1];

/*
echo "Current: $current";
echo "Prev: $prevID";
echo "Next: $nextID";
*/
?>

<div class="navigation">
<?php if (!empty($prevID)) { ?>
<div class="alignleft"><a href="<?php echo get_permalink($prevID); ?>">Previous</a></div>
<?php }
if (!empty($nextID)) { ?>
<div class="alignright"><a href="<?php echo get_permalink($nextID); ?>">Next</a></div>
<?php } ?>
<div class="clear"><!-- --></div>
</div><!-- .navigation -->

If you’re using this on a page template, it can go inside or outside the loop.

The commented print_r and echo lines are useful for seeing what’s going on. (Wrap this whole chunk of code in pre tags if you do uncomment those lines.) The get_page_hierarchy function returns a flat array of pages with the children grouped after their parents. However, it seems to be sorting them in the reverse of my established menu_order. Not sure what to do about that, short of writing my own hierarchy function. I’m leaning toward doing just that, but… try this out and let me know what you think.

The if statements surrounding the links ensure that the first page doesn’t get a previous link, and the last page doesn’t get a next.

ETA: adding ‘&orderby=menu_order’ to the get_posts parameters puts the top level pages in the correct order, but the children are still backwards.

Also, this editor insists on encoding the ampersands in that parameter string… be sure to fix those before you try the code!

Revised version that keeps things in order:

<?php
$pagelist = get_pages('sort_column=menu_order&amp;sort_order=asc');
$pages = array();
foreach ($pagelist as $page) {
   $pages[] += $page->ID;
}

//print_r($pages);

$current = array_search($post->ID, $pages);
$prevID = $pages[$current-1];
$nextID = $pages[$current+1];

/*
echo "Current: $current";
echo "Prev: $prevID";
echo "Next: $nextID";
*/
?>

<div class="navigation">
<?php if (!empty($prevID)) { ?>
<div class="alignleft"><a href="<?php echo get_permalink($prevID); ?>">Previous</a></div>
<?php }
if (!empty($nextID)) { ?>
<div class="alignright"><a href="<?php echo get_permalink($nextID); ?>">Next</a></div>
<?php } ?>
<div class="clear"><!-- --></div>
</div><!-- .navigation -->

Test that for me? (Mind the ampersands.) If it works for you as well, I’ll turn it into a plugin.

I’m sorry I didn’t post back about this earlier. I was checking for replies for a little while after I posted it, but then gave up and didn’t see your reply. Thank you for working it up.

The prev and next links work exactly as expected, and the commented out echo commands display the proper page ID for the prev and next. For the current page, the array key is echoed, not the page ID. When you print_r the array, that key corresponds to the current page ID value. So, it’s all good.

I am going to try to make this into a plugin with a shortcode so my editors can use this easily without having to choose a specific template (which is where I hard-coded it.) Thanks once again.

Chris

I made it a plugin. Enjoy!

Thank you. Much better than what I was doing with it ??