Title: Questions about sub-navigation
Last modified: August 19, 2016

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# Questions about sub-navigation

 *  [nateeanes](https://wordpress.org/support/users/nateeanes/)
 * (@nateeanes)
 * [17 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/questions-about-sub-navigation/)
 * Hi All,
    I am building a site using WordPress as a CMS (it only has pages, no
   posts). I’ve got a few questions:
 * 1) I’m going to have a left-hand column that will be populated with sub-nav links
   which will change depending what area of the site you’re looking at. I know one
   way to do this would be to make several different page templates and hard-code
   the appropriate sub-nav items into the left column of each one; however, is there
   a way to do this dynamically, such that if I add a page to a section or change
   a page’s title, the sub-nav will automatically update to reflect this? Is there
   a specific plug-in that might do this?
 * 2) How do I change the URL strings for pages, so that instead of, for instance,
   having “page_id=2” or something like that, I can use customized page name rather
   than an ID number?
 * 3) What is the code to call a specific page to a particular place on your site’s
   Index template page? On my site’s homepage (Index template), I want to have 2-
   3 sections that can be updated automatically, but how do I get the template to
   call those pages to the right spots?
 * Thanks!
    Nate

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

 *  [eriiicam](https://wordpress.org/support/users/eriiicam/)
 * (@eriiicam)
 * [17 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/questions-about-sub-navigation/#post-918283)
 * #1) I’d recommend custom fields. When you are creating or editing a page, they
   appear in Advanced Options directly below the page content editing form.
 * Each custom field takes a ‘key’ and a ‘value’. This is pretty straight-forward.
   On the template end I use this to give me a set of variables matching the keys,
   with values assigned:
 * `<?php foreach (get_post_custom() as $key => $value) { $$key = $value; } ?>`
 * So if you establish a ‘section’ custom-field key that you set for each page, 
   with values matching the 4 (or whatever) different sections of the site requiring
   different navigation, all you need to do is check the value of `$section` on 
   each page and load the relevant nav. Does that makes sense?
 * #2) Check the ‘settings’ tab, and the ‘permalinks’ sub tab. Or, more reliably,
   on the page creation/editing form a permalink line appears (after you have entered
   a title), and you can change it as you like.
 * #3) Good question. I don’t know. I’ve always used posts instead of pages to build
   a CMS on WP – which makes that much simpler because you just call the loop as
   many times as you need.

Viewing 1 replies (of 1 total)

The topic ‘Questions about sub-navigation’ is closed to new replies.

 * 1 reply
 * 2 participants
 * Last reply from: [eriiicam](https://wordpress.org/support/users/eriiicam/)
 * Last activity: [17 years, 5 months ago](https://wordpress.org/support/topic/questions-about-sub-navigation/#post-918283)
 * Status: not resolved

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