A Plugin for Managing Pages and Menus Easily

How many times have you had a project in which you have to build dozens of pages and then change those pages throughout the year on a regular Spring , Summer, Fall, Winter cycle. In effect you have almost 4 times the number of pages to manage.
Advanced Page Manager WP Plugin is geared just for this sometimes tedious task:
apage1

Advanced  Page Manager-APM offers 3 key benefits to developers working on page intensive projects:

  1. First, APM allows users to layout pages in menu-order format including sub-pages and sub-sub-pages if required. There is no need to use the Appearance | Menu command [see below for limitations]. APM not only sets the Menu layout for Pages but helps keep it in order;
  2. APM adds 4 useful commands to each Page in the PageList:
    • Rename provides convenient renaming of Pages;
    • Unpublish/Publish provides a convenient way to take a page out of activity duty -say you want to take the page Spring Color Chorus [as seen in screenshot]  off line  until  Spring just hit Unpublish and the page remains in the database but disappears from the current menu;
    • Template allows developers to create/maintain many page templates for different page layouts and quickly deploy them;
    • Move is the key command used to maintain the desired menu layout overtime. Inevitably client management wants to change the order of the menuitems during the year and the Move command makes this easy to do.
  3. Ability to quickly create dozens of new Pages when you have to handle a special event as seen in this video. Remember the Rename command makes it easy to change the template page names very quickly. See video for example:

Here is a WordPress developer that worked on a Community Civic center project which had dozens of constantly changing groups of active and then inactive pages. It would have been a God-Send to have Advanced Page Manager available for that project.

Cautions

APM will work with the Appearance | Menu command but there are limitations. First,  Unpublished Pages will have to be manually removed from any active menus, APM does not do so for you. Likewise any change in the tree layout in APM will not be reflected in the Appearance | Menu – users will have to make all those changes themselves. But, renaming a Page will be reflected in the Appearance | Menu automatically. Also Template changes will be reflected in how a page subsequently displays.

Summary

Marios Alexandriou of Simplr Software in Toronto has written one of those gem plugins. In general Advanced Page Manager truly simplifies managing pages and menus dramatically. Best for website with a dozen pages or more but APM really can be used even for  sites with a modest number of pages.

2 Responses

  1. Such a nice tutorial for newbies as well as experienced holders. I have gone through many posts but found here very simple and step by step guidelines. After reading this post, advanced page manager plugin is too simple for me. Thanks a lot, dude.