Here’s the scenario. You have a WordPress MU site with multiple blogs, but for whatever reason, you want every blog to have the same main navigation and pages. Your main site/blog hosts all of your pages. So how do you go about creating a WordPress MU Theme that will use the navigation and pages from your main site/blog accross all of your blogs? Well, I’m here to tell you how I did it.
The WordPress Codex has a function called ‘wp_list_pages.’ What I wanted to do is create a new function called ‘wp_list_main_pages.’ So I simply searched my WordPress install and copied the ‘get_pages’ and ‘wp_list_pages’ functions and pasted them into my theme’s ‘functions.php’ file. From here I made a few edits to these functions. To start with, I renamed them ‘wp_list_main_pages’ and ‘get_main_pages.’
Below is the final code I’m using to display the main navigation accross blogs. I made notes in bold to help. Hope this is helpful to you Googling coders. 🙂
// You can use this function instead of 'wp_list_pages' in your theme function wp_list_main_pages($args = '') { $defaults = array( 'depth' => 0, 'show_date' => '', 'date_format' => get_option('date_format'), 'child_of' => 0, 'exclude' => '', 'title_li' => __('Pages'), 'echo' => 1, 'authors' => '', 'sort_column' => 'menu_order, post_title' ); $r = wp_parse_args( $args, $defaults ); extract( $r, EXTR_SKIP ); $output = ''; $current_page = 0; // sanitize, mostly to keep spaces out $r['exclude'] = preg_replace('[^0-9,]', '', $r['exclude']); // Allow plugins to filter an array of excluded pages $r['exclude'] = implode(',', apply_filters('wp_list_pages_excludes', explode(',', $r['exclude']))); // Query pages. $r['hierarchical'] = 0; // Right here we call our new 'get_main_pages' function $pages = get_main_pages($r); if ( !empty($pages) ) { if ( $r['title_li'] ) $output .= '<li class="pagenav">' . $r['title_li'] . '<ul>'; global $wp_query; if ( is_page() || $wp_query->is_posts_page ) $current_page = $wp_query->get_queried_object_id(); $output .= walk_page_tree($pages, $r['depth'], $current_page, $r); if ( $r['title_li'] ) $output .= '</ul></li>'; } $output = apply_filters('wp_list_pages', $output); // This line is sloppy and needs improvement. // You have to remove the name of the blog your currently on from you global navigation. // I'm doing this the simplest but least scalable way here. $output = str_replace("pressroom/", "", $output); if ( $r['echo'] ) echo $output; else return $output; } // This is essentially a private function function &get_main_pages($args = '') { global $wpdb; // This is the magic line. // Now when the SQL runs to pull your navigation pages, it'll use your main blogs ID. $wpdb->set_blog_id(1); // Notice here I call the original get_pages function and return the results $pages = get_pages($args); return $pages; }