Page to output sub-pages (children)

Question

I want to output all sub-pages of a particular page in a neat ul li list. Including: featured image, title, and first 50 characters of page content.

I'm very new to Wordpress, I've tried reading through the codex and I seem to have found something but I cannot get it to work.

First, I have created a new template of "list page" (listpage.php) so that I can choose pages where I wish them to list out sub pages.

I still need the content of that page to display, and the ul li list to output below, essentially so the client can add some intro text.

Here is the code I have from the codex

<?php get_page_children( $page_id, $pages ) ?>

I tried to change the parameters to meet my requirements, the page ID is page 6 (you can see it here)

I cannot work out what the $pages parameter is meant to be, but looking at other examples on the Codex page it seems that $all_wp_pages can be used.

So I tried this:

<?php get_page_children( $6, $all_wp_pages ) ?>

And got an error:

Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_LNUMBER, expecting T_VARIABLE or '$' in /mnt/vol2/home/b/a/barkin10/public_html/wordpress/wp-content/themes/Yasmin/listpage.php on line 27

So I really don't know what I'm supposed to be doing :(

Also...

Even if this did work, because I have to put the page ID it has occured to me that this listpage template will only be useable on the page that the ID corresponds to. I want to be able to give any page a template of list page and be able to output the children (featured image, page title and first 50 chars) but no idea how.

Answer 1

You can use for example very basic WP Query (or get_pages or what ever. this is just one example) (http://codex.wordpress.org/Class_Reference/WP_Query)

// The Query
$currentPageId = $post->ID; // get current page id inside loop
$args = array(
    'post_parent' => $currentPageId,
    'post_type' => 'page',
    'posts_per_page' => -1
    );
$query = new WP_Query( $args );

// The Loop
if ( $query->have_posts() ) {
    echo '<ul>';
    while ( $query->have_posts() ) {
        $query->the_post();
        echo '<li>' . get_the_title() . '</li>'; // this one outputs only title
    }
    echo '</ul>';
} else {
    // no posts found
}

/* Restore original Post Data */
wp_reset_postdata();

And there you have a list with titles for all the child pages of current page.

Answer 2

Here is another way you can get it.

$args = array(
'posts_per_page'  => 5,
'offset'          => 0,
//'category'        => '',
'orderby'         => 'post_date',
'order'           => 'DESC',
//'include'         => '',
//'exclude'         => '',
//'meta_key'        => '',
//'meta_value'      => '',
'post_type'       => 'page',
//'post_mime_type'  => '',
'post_parent'     => '5', // Enter your post parent here
'post_status'     => 'publish',
'suppress_filters' => true 
  );

 $all_posts=get_posts($args);
 echo '<ul>';//Your ul section
 foreach ($all_posts as $post) : setup_postdata( $post ); 
echo '<li>';// your li section
the_title();
    the_excerpt();
    the_post_thumbnail(); // You can use this if you're using the built-in feature image facility
  echo '</li>';
  endforeach;
  echo '</ul>';
   wp_reset_query();

Try this now.