Should I leave "order" field blank in Page Attributes

  • In WP help for Add/Edit page it says:

    Order – Pages are usually ordered alphabetically, but you can choose your own order by entering a number (1 for first, etc.) in this field.

    I’m trying to understand ‘where’ this page order actually appears on my site. Nav/menu items’ order are controlled under Menus, so don’t understand how the order number would effect those.

    I do have 2 sections of the site with subpages that I will want to control differently. One set of subpages I will want to be ordered manually and the other alphabetically.

    Hope someone can shed some light on this. Thanks.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    It’s part of an old system that has been mostly replaced by the Menus system and you can safely leave it blank.

    In the old days, themes would just arbitrarily display all pages in navigation, and the only way to organize them was with this numerical system.

    Now, with the Menus system, you can graphical choose which pages to display and how they’re organized. ??

    Thread Starter sdfrio

    (@sdfrio)

    Thanks for the reply James! Now I’m wondering why a dev I hired for some work was stressing the importance of me setting up a numbering scheme for that order field. Any idea why he might be pushing that?

    While we’re talking here. Like I mentioned in my initial post, I’m going to have a part of my site where all the subpages should be in alphabetical order. It’s a section of artist bios. On the main (landing) page I’d like text links of all those (alphabectially ordered) artist name. Then, on the individual artist pages I’d like to have a dropdown menu (widget, I suppose) with all of those links. Is there an easy enough way to do this? “Ideally” both the text list and the dropdown widget would automatically update everytime I add a new artist bio (but the auto update isn’t ‘essential’)

    Any suggestions? Tahanks.

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Now I’m wondering why a dev I hired for some work was stressing the importance of me setting up a numbering scheme for that order field. Any idea why he might be pushing that?

    Well, it used to be necessary until the new drag-and-drop system was created years ago. Since the old system is still in place, I could see why someone would still think it’s worth doing. To be honest, I think it’s a waste of time since the new system exists.

    Is there an easy enough way to do this? “Ideally” both the text list and the dropdown widget would automatically update everytime I add a new artist bio

    The only way for the menu system to automatically update would be to have it automatically add all new pages to each menu. Beyond that, there is no way to automatically order it except having the newest be at the bottom of the list.

    Given that, I’d just manually add each to the menu and order them as desired, which would basically add just one more step to your workflow.

    Write a Page -> Place it in the Menu.

Viewing 3 replies - 1 through 3 (of 3 total)
  • The topic ‘Should I leave "order" field blank in Page Attributes’ is closed to new replies.