WordPress plugin: Exclude Pages from Navigation

This week’s plugin is a little gem called Exclude Pages from Navigation. It does exactly what it says it does, just that one thing, very simply and very well.

Here’s the problem solved by this handy-dandy plugin.

The overzealous WordPress menu generator

Let’s say you want to include a nice list of navigation links to your important pages. In my case, they are across the top of the screen just below the header:

Figure 1: Navigation links generated by WordPress, nicely centered by the Atahualpa theme.

You can also show them as a list in a sidebar or the footer, to name a few more choices.

Wherever you decide to display them, WordPress has a nice feature that automatically generates a list of your pages. This works great until you create a page that you don’t actually want to show up in your public navigation list.

Let’s say, for example, that I’ve created a page that will be shown to anyone who successfully signs up for my email newsletter, thanking them for confirming their email address. WordPress’s automatic menu generator will stick it into my nice menu by default:

Figure 2: Uh oh, WordPress has messed up my nice clean navigation menu!

Eww! I don’t want this weirdly titled link showing up in the middle of my nice navigation bar! Or anywhere in my navigation bar! I want this page to be invisible until it’s needed.

For one thing, it messes up my nice clean navigation. For another thing, any visitor to my site could click on this link and get confused (“What? I haven’t confirmed my email address!”).

This looks like a job for the Exclude Pages plugin!

You’ll need to install the plugin in the usual manner, and go ahead and activate it. There’s no configuration needed.

Now, whenever you create or edit a Page, you’ll see a new widget called Exclude Pages (probably on the lower right corner of your editing screen — you may need to scroll to see it).

Figure 3: Default behavior of the Exclude Pages widget

As shown in Figure 3, this widget contains a single checkbox, labeled “Include this page in user menus”. By default, this box is checked, which mimics the WordPress default behavior (all pages are automatically included).

For any given page, all you need to do is uncheck the checkbox, and make sure to save your changes (by clicking “Save Draft” or “Update Page” in the Publish widget).

Figure 4: Simply uncheck the checkbox to make the page disappear from WordPress menus.

You’ll need to uncheck this checkbox on every page you want to exclude — it works on a per-page basis.

There’s one exception: Child pages of an excluded page are also excluded, which takes advantage of the WordPress Page hierarchy feature. That’s a whole nother post, but I’ll just quickly mention that you can look in the “Attributes” widget in your Page editing screen to see (and set) the Parent page of the Page you’re editing.

Figure 5: The plugin notifies you when the WordPress page hierarchy changes its default behavior.

The plugin calls Parent pages “ancestors” (to include parents of parents, presumably) and provides a handy link to edit the excluded ancestor.

Suggested uses for the Exclude Pages plugin

Here are a few types of pages you might want to exclude using this handy checkbox:

Thank-you and confirmation pages
Custom error pages
Privacy policy page
Test pages (to test formatting, PayPal buttons, etc. on a live published page)

Note that this plugin does not hide pages from search engines; it merely removes them from the WordPress automatic menu generating function. So don’t use this plugin thinking that you can publish “secret” pages, because published pages can easily be found by Google and hence by anyone searching your site.

I believe it’s fine to use it for test pages, even those containing live elements like sign-up forms and PayPal buttons, because once the testing is done you’ll either delete the test page, unpublish it, or it will become a live part of your website.