Enhance your WordPress website using the Improved Include Page plugin
Ever wondered how you can provide someone with a sidebar text option without having to use widgets? Or maybe you’ve designed a slightly different home page and want to display more than one area of content? Vito Tardia’s Improved Include Page plugin is very useful for that and super easy to use.
Just like any other plugins, simply go to WordPress, download, install the plugin and activate it. Once activated you can use the following function in your templates:
<?php if(function_exists('iinclude_page')) iinclude_page(post_id); ?> Creating a sidebar text option without using widgets
If you take a look at the Aquattro Living website, you will see that the contact information appears at the bottom of the left hand side column on all pages. This information is likely to remain unchanged for a long time, but instead of inserting it in the template file and make it unmanageable by the client, all you need to do is create a new page called Contact Us Sidebar, exclude it from the main navigation and insert the include function in your sidebar.php template file.
Display more than one area of content on a template
Both West Coast Sightseeing and Ascent websites have three boxes of content on their home page. These different area of content are easy to create using this plugin. Simply create three new pages, called for example home col1, home col2, home col3 and display the content using the following code:
<div id="col1"> <?php if(function_exists('iinclude_page')) iinclude_page(1); ?> </div><div id="col2"> <?php if(function_exists('iinclude_page')) iinclude_page(2); ?> </div><div id="col3"> <?php if(function_exists('iinclude_page')) iinclude_page(3); ?> </div>
You would of course change the post_id numbers to the number of your new pages and mark up the css to display the columns as you’ve stipulated in your design.
[...] This post was Twitted by sorich87 [...]
Thank you for this! This was all I needed to know to do what I’ve been wanting to do in AGES! You don’t know how long I’ve been looking for sth like this :) this is the one clue one would need to make a non-blog WP site
I already saw the include plugin, but the explanation on WP of it didn’t really convince me yet
Thanks again!
Hello
i have a question conserning “Display more than one area of content on a template”, when i create 3 more pages, then they will appear also in navigation, but i dont want that. Is there any solution to make them not to appear on navigation bar.
Hi Indrek,
If you create these three new pages and want to exclude them from your navigation, then you simply use the exclude term in your wp_list_functions as explained here – http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_list_pages#Exclude_Pages_from_List
Christine,
I’m using this plugin for 2- and 3-column layout pages. I’ve created my pages and included them in my templates, as you’ve described above. The template is assigned to a separate, blank parent page.
When I make and preview changes on the included page (i.e. column content), I am only able to preview the changes as a single page and not in the layout of the parent page. Do you know of a way to preview the parent page so I can see how the column content (the included page) appears in the parent page?
Cheers,
Greg
If you preview the included pages, you’ll never be able to see the layout of the parent. You have to preview the parent page.
In the admin, select the parent page and preview it. That’s all that should be required.