Not all the parent pages are available

Hiya,

Is the page in question published? I know it no longer shows unpublished pages as an option when looking for parent pages, so that may be what is happening here.

Thanks Marius, of course it’s published. Until I come up with a solution (or the bug is fixed in the plugin) I had to switch to the classic editor with the additional plugin. In the classic editor, all the pages appear alphabetically ordered, so this way is much easier to select whatever parent page you need. And, of course, 100% of my published pages are available, which does not happen in the Gutenberg editor.

In my case this update of WordPress has been a big step backwards.

I have a similar problem. All of the sudden, a top level page became unavailable as a parent page along with all its children. I can choose them as a parent page when I’m in the “all pages” overview and I’m using quick edit, but not when editing the page.

I have same issue. Pages are missing in parent page drop-down. If I switch to classic editor or quick edit they are all there. Definitely bug in glutenberg

Hi everyone,

Ditto for me with this issue. Some parent pages do not show up in the Page
Attributes–>Parent Page list. What happens most often is that I create a new page and publish it. I then create another new page that needs to be the first new page’s child, but that first new page doesn’t show up in the Parent Page list, grinding my work to a halt. I just updated to WP 5.1.1 hoping this issue had been resolved, but no such luck. Sooo–back to the Classic Editor plugin.

One more person having the exact problem. A couple useful details to note:

My site has over 200 pages. And it seems only under the pages created recently the dropdown menu does not show all available parent pages. There’s no problem with the older pages created after a certain period (which I yet to find out when exactly.)

It seems that the only pages that show in the Parent Page drop-down are those that were created with WP 4.xxx. None of the pages I created with WP 5+ are listed. Also, my UI’s Parent Page drop-down shows multiple instances of the pages and their children. In some cases I have a parent page with up to 30 or more child pages (photography website with a main gallery page and individual sub-pages for each image in the gallery). So the parent attribute drop-down displays hundreds of pages and sub-pages, multiple repeats of those pages, and only those pages that were created pre-WP 5. I just don’t get why the code from the Classic Editor plugin isn’t just used in Gutenberg. The Classic Editor plugin works perfectly, which is why I am still using it…

The problem remains unsolved, and it’s a pain in the ass. For now, my best approach is having the Classic Editor plugin install, and activate it just for the sole purpose of selecting the parent page I need. Afterwards I deactivate it again and continue using Gutenberg. Seems weird but I havent came up with a better solution yet.

Someone pointed out that the Parent Attribute in Gutenberg works in Quick Edit mode. When I’m building a page with needed Gutenberg features I navigate to Quick Edit, set the correct parent page, then navigate back to the Edit Page (I usually have multiple browsers open to make it as painless as possible). For simple pages I just use the Classic Editor plugin. It would be nice if a Gutenberg developer would chime in and shed some light as to why this issue is lingering on for so long.

Hiya,

This is tracked at https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/9441 the problem appears to be that the more pages you have, the longer it takes to load the parent page selector, so you have to wait a time proportional to the amount of pages unfortunately.

We’re actively looking for a good solution to this though.

Thanks, Marius, for the update.

Thanks Marius for the update, but that’s not the main problem. I noticed that since the beginning, so in the end it’s no problem to wait a few seconds for the pages to load.

The real problem is that once they are loaded, there are still a lot of pages missing. Not all the pages are loaded in the dropdown. And they don’t appear in alphabetical order either, so even founding one particular page can be a pain in the ass. I have 300+ pages published in my website.

But again, the main problem is that many pages do not load in that dropdown menu.

Good luck guys!

Well said @jmavilaroman. Put another way: The subject of this thread is not “whether” the parent attribute drop-down appears but, rather, the “content” of the drop-down once it does appear.

I had the same issue after recent update to wordpress 5.
I had only 3 pages in “parent page” drop-down.
After I opened and re-saved some page on top level of my hierarchy the tree was back. Hopefully, this trick will have someone. And I disabled gutenberg with plugin.

@rovenann:
I experimented with converting top-level pages on my site to Block format and updating those pages and didn’t see any improvement in my case. I’m glad it seemed to work for you.

As a side-note, the process of using Gutenberg blocks to convert my Classic pages required extensive HTML knowledge to reproduce the same layout and look. I had to manually add <a href=""</a> to turn images into links; title="" to add tool tips; and my own classes for styling. All of my custom code was deleted when I made the conversion, requiring me to re-do all of it. Gutenberg has made WordPress exponentially more difficult for those who use custom HTML/CSS on their sites.

Marius L. J. (@clorith):
After reading the posts you linked to at github (https://github.com/WordPress/gutenberg/issues/9441) my takeaway is:

1) WP Users who have large websites with multiple hundreds of pages are small in number and;
2) Gutenberg developers do not find the issue which is the subject of this thread a priority because it affects only a small percentage of Users.

My conclusion is that those who have large websites generally choose not to use WordPress and that WordPress perpetuates this dynamic by not prioritizing the issues that this group of Users is experiencing. Update after Gutenberg update comes and goes with no solution to the Parent Attribute drop-down content deficiencies discussed here. I truly feel bad for those WP Users who do not have HTML/CSS skills.