How to generate a list of child pages, and use some of their custom fields?

Question

I have a page structure like this:

-Home
-Cars
  -Volvo 640
   - Pics
   - Info
  -Porsche 911
   - Pics
   - Info

I'd like to generate a list of cars on the Cars page of all the cars (which are child pages of Cars). How would I do this? The list is basically a sub-menu which should show all the cars in alphabetical order (note, I don't need links to the 'grandchildren' - Pics, Info). I also need to grab Custom Field data from each car page, and put that beside the link to the page.. is that possible?

Answer 1

You could use get_pages to do this, like so:

<?php
    $args = array(
        'post_type' => 'page',
        'child_of' => 7,
        );
    $postobj = get_pages($args);
    foreach($postobj as $item){
        $dir = get_bloginfo('template_directory'); // Theme directory
        $title = $item->post_title;
        $parent = $item->post_parent;
        $id = $item->guid;
        $name = $item->post_name;

Once you get to here, you can pull out your custom fields and put them into variables.

        $model_number = get_post_meta($item->ID, 'model_number', true);

I would use an if statement of some kind to build those top headings. For instance you could do:

            if($model_number == true){
                echo stuff;
            } else {
                echo other stuff;
        }
    }
?>

It's rough, but I think this could get you quite a long ways. Essentially, you're programmatically building your headings and returning everything to get printed. The key is formatting everything and getting your conditions set up right.

Answer 2

The wp_list_pages() function can give you a list of your child pages. Grabbing custom field data from each page, though, would require a separate query and a bit more work. But here's a start:

$args = array(
    depth => '1',
    child_of => '123'
);

wp_list_pages( $args );

This will give you a list of links to all of the child pages of page ID 123. The depth specification is to prevent retrieving grandchild pages as well.

Like I said before, though, getting the custom field data is a bit trickier. You'll need to first get the page ID of each of your child pages (probably using query_posts()) and store them in an array. Then you'll loop through that array and get the custom field data from each page in turn.

So it's doable ... but I can't offer a quick solution off the top of my head.