Additionally I came up against two other issues:

1. Finding out the depth of the page within the hierarchy of the site.
2. Control over whether the menu displayed “sibling” links or “children” links.

A lot of the existing tutorials are great, but their implementation is very broad. The “wp_list_pages” function within WordPress is great, very flexible and well documented. Yet swapping between section or child menu based on page depth seemed to be a dead end. Until I read this great tutorial by Jake Goldman talking about a hardly mentioned but great function, called “get_post_ancestors();”. This cool function will create an array of the current posts ancestors. Using this I expanded on Jake Goldman’s great article, adding a little more finite control over the submenu.

Page depth and sibling / child code for WordPress

Heres the PHP code I dropped into the sidebar.php of my WordPress theme. Hopefully should be of use. My example displays the sibling/ section links into the navigation. While displaying the child links for all the pages higher in the hiarachy. Hope this code is usefull.

#Creates Array from the pages ancestors post ID's
$post_ancestors = get_post_ancestors($post);

#Un-comment array for guidence
#print_r($post_ancestors);

#Gets the base post id
$top_page = array_pop($post_ancestors);

#Get post depth
#After a certain depth into the page hierarchy the page displays sibling menu items in sub menu.

if (count($post_ancestors) <= 1) {
#Shallow Link Display Children
$children = wp_list_pages('title_li=&child_of='.$post->ID.'&echo=0&depth=1');

 } elseif (count($post_ancestors) >= 2) {

#Deep Link Display Siblings or Section Links
$children = wp_list_pages('title_li=&child_of='.$post->post_parent.'&echo=0&depth=1');

} elseif (is_page()) {

#Default Display Children
$children = wp_list_pages('title_li=&child_of='.$post->ID.'&echo=0&depth=1');

} 

if ($children) {
#Outputs the submenu if it exists
echo('
Sub Menu');
echo($children);
echo('

');

Example of the hierarchy of the site

• Locations
  • Manchester
  • Dubai
  • Turkey
  • Dubai Marina
    • Botanica
    • The Torch
      • Overview
      • Facilities
      • Properties
        • 2 Bedroom Apartment
      • Payment Plans
      • FAQ’s

Makes extensive use of the Jquery Slider ui and Datatables plugin. Feeding off my first Mysql database, that in turn is populated by an xml file. All ive got to do now is tie the rest of the site into the new pricing database.

I highly recomend the Pikachoose gallery simple for its amazing simplicity and ease of use. Easy to style and adapt to my own needs, including a inbuilt carousel feature utilizing slider.js. I’ll post a link to an example lightbox gallery soon.

List images from a folder automatically via PHP

Heres a little code snippet I used to list all the images in a folder.

// the directory, where your images are stored
$imgdir = '/images/'; 

// list of filetypes you
$allowed_types = array('png','jpg','jpeg','gif'); want to show

$dimg = opendir($imgdir);
while($imgfile = readdir($dimg))
{
 if(in_array(strtolower(substr($imgfile,-3)),$allowed_types))
 {
  $a_img[] = $imgfile;
  sort($a_img);
  reset ($a_img);
 }
}
// total image number
$totimg = count($a_img); 

for($x=0; $x < $totimg; $x++)
{
 $size = getimagesize($imgdir.'/'.$a_img[$x]);

 // do whatever
 $halfwidth = ceil($size[0]/2);
 $halfheight = ceil($size[1]/2);
 echo '


';
}

Its good to chat, especially when it’s free

After getting endless quotes, for expensive solutions. Help Center Live was brought to my attention. This php mysql based solutions seems great, except its windows only at the moment. The good news is, version 3 is coming out soon with full support.

Help Center Live is an open-source, community driven live chat & support system. You may easily provide live support on your website just like large companies do with very little work. With Help Center Live, you can provide a real-time, live support or sales person experience.

Take a look at Help Center Live and let me know how things go