A couple weeks have gone by, and I have been tweaking this site a bit, both in the look and feel of the user interface and in the functionality in the plugins installed.
I added one new plugin, deactivated one and replaced it with another.
Since my last post, I have deactivated ShareThis. I felt it caused too much delay in page loading. In its place, I am using Sociable, which looks prettier and loads faster.
For managing the top level navigation, I found Page Lists Plus. This plugin gives you a great deal of control over the main nav, which WordPress creates based on your Pages. The link to my resume in the top nav is a link to a Google Docs page. And I have created a couple of other pages that I want in the site but that I don’t want in the main nav.
To configure Page Lists Plus to do the redirect, install and activate the plugin. On the Setting page, check this box:
Then create the Page, where the following appears at the bottom of the admin:
As you see, I have entered the Google Docs URL in the Redirect To field. Now the Resume page appears in the top navigation, but redirects to an off site URL instead of the page in WordPress.
So, this Part 2 of the series isn’t earth shattering in content, but, in the case of the main navigation, important in managing the functionality of the site.
The limited behavior of the main navigation, based as it is on Pages, belies WordPress’ history as a blogging platform. As WordPress continues to grow towards a more full-featured CMS, little amenities like these need to migrate from plugins into core functionality.