WiscWeb - Creating Parent / Child Page Structures

There may be times that you will want to create a site structure that groups pages together with similar themes. A Parent page is the first, or top-level page while Child pages can be sub-items of the parent they are associated with. This assists with breadcrumb navigation as well as best practice for general page structures.

In this document:

Purpose

A page structure that includes parent / child relationships helps both the content editors and creators, as well as the users of your site. On the administration side, grouping pages together makes finding that similar content easier and more manageable in the WordPress page structures. For users, it can create a breadcrumb trail for ease of navigation within a specific section of a site.

Creating a Parent / Child page relationship

Creating a Parent / Child relationship is an easy process, and begins with WiscWeb - Creating a Page. Once you have a set of pages, for example, a People section with subpages of Staff, Faculty, and Graduate Students, visitors to your site will be able to see the navigational relationship between those pages.

  1. Create the first, or Parent page. For example, the "People" page.
  2. Once that is done, you can create the subpages. Within each subpage, beneath the Publish section you should see a Page Attributes section. 

    New page with Page Attributes section displayed

  3. In the Parent drop down menu, click and choose the page that should be the parent of this page you are creating.
  4. Publish this page.

Once you have done this for any and all pages that you need to create and apply as child pages, click again on Pages in the left menu. You should now see your page list displayed, with a Parent page and the child pages offset beneath it.

Pages list with parent and child relationship displayed

When viewed in the live site, subpages of the parent will now have the appropriate bread crumb trail for the pages that are parents of it.

Bread crumb trail for Parent and Child pages

Troubleshooting

  • There can be several levels of a Parent-Child relationship, be careful to pay attention to your site structure when creating these pages and subpages.
  • Remember a page added as a drop down menu in the main menu cannot be clicked on, however this does not change the Parent-Child relationship including the bread crumbs.