How to get the children of a page (by slug)

Every now and then, I need to display a list of all the child pages of a top level page in WordPress. This might be for a sub menu, or listing of some kind, for a page that we know the slug for, but that we don’t want to go to the effort of finding the ID for. I think this is a nicer solution in case the database is migrated, although name changes are probably going to affect it more I guess on reflection.

Anyways, the function I use is this…

// get children pages of passed page
function childrenInformation($name){

	global $post;

	$thispage = $post;

	$result = new WP_Query('pagename=' . $name);
	
	$lookup = array( 
		'post_parent' => $result->post->ID,
		'post_type'   => 'page',
		'order' => 'ASC',
		'orderby' => 'menu_order'
	);

	$childpages = get_children($lookup);

	// if the page has children, spit them out.
	if(count($childpages) > 0){

		foreach($childpages as $k => $post){
			setup_postdata($post);
			echo  '<li><a href="' . get_permalink() . '">' . get_the_title() . '</a></li>';

		}

	}
	
	$post = $thispage;

}

// get children pages of passed page

function childrenInformation($name){

global $post;

$thispage = $post;

$result = new WP_Query('pagename=' . $name);

$lookup = array(

'post_parent' => $result->post->ID,

'post_type' => 'page',

'order' => 'ASC',

'orderby' => 'menu_order'

);

$childpages = get_children($lookup);

// if the page has children, spit them out.

if(count($childpages) > 0){

foreach($childpages as $k => $post){

setup_postdata($post);

echo '<li><a href="' . get_permalink() . '">' . get_the_title() . '</a></li>';

}

$post = $thispage;

}

$post is captured at the beginning of the function incase you call this half way through a post – therefore it’s not affected.

Simply call it like this

childrenInformation('about-us');

1	childrenInformation('about-us');

Image Credit: quas

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