This has been painful - upgrading RNW PageManager to work with WP 2.5.

Not that the plugin failed. It’s just that a curious omission on all the Admin pages made it a lot more difficult to use this plugin.

PageManager provides a lot of site-related functionality to RNW-enabled websites. One of its functions is to enable site developers to specify the Pages or Categories that should either be listed or excluded in the top navigation menu, the sidebars, and the footer menu. This was done with simple comma-delimited lists of Page IDs - which were easily read off the Manage Pages admin page in all prior versions :

You simply had to jot down the IDs that you either wanted in or out of a particular menu, enter the comma-delimited list into the appropriate field on the PageManager options page, and you were done :

And the result - menus without any coding :

Now it’s not just RNW that uses the comma-separated lists of IDs - these are required in some of the WordPress functions - wp_list_pages and in some of the widgets‘ options pages.

Now lets take a look at the new Manage Pages list :

Some might think it is a ‘prettier’ screen, but I think this is a case of form over function:

• The main issue - the missing IDs. (The same is for Manage Posts and Manage Categories). The only place you can see the ID is as part of the link URL - visible in the status bar when you hover over the the link.
• I used to find the Create New Page a useful link - saved having to select Write | Write Page - but this is a minor omission.
• I can see a few newbie users being somewhat bemused by this screen :
  • You only see the word Edit - if you hover over Page Name, and you get taken to the Edit window if you click on the link, and
  • You see a View tooltip if you hover over the Published/Unpublished link in the Status column.

I can see the people that have made WordPress videos grinding their teeth over this revised format, as their videos now need a complete makeover …

OK - so what did this mean for the RNW PageManager plugin?

Well - pretty much a makeover as well. From one simple Options page, I have gone to a multi-tabbed options page. Part of this reflects the new style that I have adopted for formatting my plugins, and part of this is due to the need to provide picklists for the Pages and Categories - so customers can select the required IDs for the various menus.

Now this makeover isn’t perfect - in that in this release you cannot sort the IDs - which you naturally could do in a comma-separated list (relevant for both the IncludeIDs - in the Top Menu and the FooterMenu). However, it does enable to move forward with publishing new websites, and setting up menus without trying out to fathom the Page IDs from the page and category URLs displayed in the status bar.