How to create multiple pages for PDFs

Question

In my wordpress site, I have multiple PDFs that I need to display in individual pages. I could just create a page for each PDF, but this seems very tedious. The pages will each be very similar, they will just have a different PDF embedded. I would like to do be able to create a template which creates a separate page for each PDF in the DB. Each page would have a URL that looks something like /pdf/:id.

Ideally I would like to do this with a plugin, because only the system administrator has access to the source code.

Thank you for your help.

Answer 1

If you really want to include them in a page, you could create a page template which pulls in the requested PDF by ID. So for example, you create the Page www.example.com/pdf/ and add a query string so when someone visits www.example.com/pdf/?id=234 they see the PDF which has a post ID of 234. Within the Page Template, you'd check

// make sure id is present in the url
if(!empty($_GET['id'])) {
wp_get_attachment_url( $id );
    // get the url to the pdf
    $pdf = wp_get_attachment_url( $_GET['id'] );
    // now add your desired code to embed/link/display the pdf
}

Depending on your needs, perhaps you don't really need a Page wrapped around the PDFs. You could instead just link directly to the PDFs since most modern browsers will navigate to them and display them in a more flexible, responsive way than embedding them within a Page. With this approach, if you need a link to every PDF, you could create a Page Template that instead searches for all media where the file type is PDF, then have a foreach loop that links to the specific URL. You'd just want to make sure that each PDF within the Media Library has a decently readable Title so the text of the link makes sense.