List child pages by slug not ID?

Question

I am looking to use the wp_list_pages function to show children pages of a specific page ID. I was able to do this easily, but now I found an issue with it. I am running a Wordpress network of sites (total of 8). I am trying to set this up where I will only need 2 theme folders because there are 2 main blogs with 3 sub sites that fall under each. So, I am trying to make as many dynamic calls in my theme files as possible to prevent duplicating themes for each site.

In my sidebar I am using the following code:

<ul>
<?
    wp_list_pages('orderby=name&depth=1&order=DESC&show_count=0&child_of=10&title_li=');
?>
</ul>

The issue I am running in to is, on each of the sub sites the page ID's have changed but my sitemap for the most part has not. So on my main site child_of=10 displays the proper sub pages in my sidebar, but in my sub-sites the child_of=10 is a different page so I am not getting the proper child pages to display. I had a similar issue with pulling in posts but I was able to do the following:

<?
    $category = get_category_by_slug('news');
    wp_list_categories('orderby=name&order=DESC&show_count=0&exclude=53&title_li=&child_of='.$category->term_id);
?>

I am trying to achieve a similar solution for wp_list_pages where I use a page slug to identify the child pages instead of the page ID. Been digging around and trying a few posts I have found on Google / here but no luck. Hoping someone can help me out.

Answer 1

Why don't you use get_page_by_title() to get the page object, and then pass its ID as the child_of parameter?

If you would rather use the actual slug, then get_page_by_path( $slug ) should do the trick.

So:

if ( $page = get_page_by_path( 'your-page-slug' ) ){
  wp_list_pages( 'orderby=name&depth=1&order=DESC&show_count=0&child_of=' .$page->ID . '&title_li=' );
}