WordPress beats TypePad (again): Pages

Back when TypePad was still in the lead as blogging platform, by the end of 2006, WordPress already had pages. Soon, TypePad followed suit, but now WordPress has taken the lead again: 1) Hidden pages and 2) Sub-Pages. Essentially these are the same thing, but they work in a different ways, depending on your theme setup. Hidden pages can be used to make pages not show up in the page navigation bar in your header, and sub-pages can be used to structure your pages, much like nested categories, that I have already talked about.

How does it work?

Look at my page navigation bar. You see four pages, right? About, Contact, Scoreboard, and Comments and Suggestions. Wrong, there’s more. There are two more pages as you can see below. The Copyright page is accessible from my the copyright notice in my sidebar, and the google-code-something-html page is a page I used to verify my site with Google Webmaster Tools. (I set it to private after verification).

Page structure in WordPress

But why don’t these pages show up in my navigation bar? Usually, when you publish pages they go straight into the navigation bar, and if you have too many pages the bar simply overflows and becomes incredibly cluttered and well, awful looking. With hidden pages (or sub-pages if you like) the navigation bar can be streamlined to contain only the page(s) you want to appear. For example, no more than one row on the navigation bar, or only the “Home” link.

How to make hidden or sub-pages

When writing a page simply, select a parent page for the current page from the drop-down menu. Also note that you can order pages. By default, they are ordered alphabetically, but you can change the order as you wish, according to the number you assign to them, except for the home page, which is always left (or right, depending on your theme) on your navigation bar.

Hiding pages in WordPress

Also note that pages can be made Private, meaning that only you can see them, or password-protected, meaning readers must type in a password to see it.

If you use sub-pages with your pages widget, the pages will appear neatly structured and indented, according to the parent they belong to. Private pages will not appear at all anywhere.

Even more options: The WordPress Pages widget

In the Pages widget you have even more options for the display of your pages. Here you can actually exclude pages from being displayed in the sidebar. Using Sub-pages takes pages off the top navigation bar and into the pages widget. Excluding pages takes them off the pages widget, which means you can have parent pages appearing in the navigation bar, but not the pages widget, i.e. no double listings.

The WordPress Pages widget

How to find the page id to exclude pages?

In Manage > Pages, simply hover your mouse pointer over the page name, and your browser will display something like this

WordPress page id

The marked number is the page id.

Here’s WordPress’ FAQ on pages.

WordPress really allows you to play around with your pages. And TypePad?

What’s up with Typepad pages?

Not much, I can tell you that. Typepad does not have themes with navigation bars and does not have sub-pages, nor private pages. It only has pages, with a little bit of ordering options:

Pages option in TypePad

If you want more than that you will manually add the pages to a text widget (TypeList in TypePad lingo).

Here’s TypePad’s own support page for making pages.

Conclusion

WordPress has beaten TypePad (again). Solidly.

WordPress versus TypePad: WordPress 3, TypePad 1.

Current scoreboard

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