Wordpress is a fantastic bit of software, so simple to use, easy to install, effortless to expand with the use of plugins etc. It does however have it’s flaws. Ever wanted to re-order your page links so they aren’t displayed alphabetically ?

Obviously this is something that is likely to be addressed in future releases of Wordpress, but as of 2.8 there is still no obvious way to do this. It has a built in function when you a defining the pages to add an order to them, but all it tends to do is display them in that order in the admin panel while leaving the actual page order on your site in the same condition as it was before.

There is a simple way around this.

Step 1. Go in to your admin panel and change the order of the pages there by editing each page individually and assigning an order in the menu on the right under “Attributes”.

What you should find is that this re-orders the list of pages you see in the page admin section but doesn’t change the order on your site.

Step 2. Add the following code where you want your page list to appear, if you are using the page widget then disable that and use this instead. To use the page list as navigation for instance, you could use the following example.

That’s it, when you next view your site you should see the pages appear in the order in the admin panel. You can obviously style the menu then to your hearts content.

This is bound to be fixed in a future release but until then, I hope you find this useful. Let me know if you do.