Making WordPress page headings different from the menu items

Just a quick WordPress tip this time for theme developers, or people who just want to customize a WordPress theme they’ve purchased.

Sometimes there are reasons to make a menu item slightly different from the title of the actual page. Perhaps your menu space is limited, but you have plenty of room in the content area. A typical example is using “FAQ” in the menu, but then the page heading actually shows “Frequently Asked Questions.”

A great way to accomplish this is the Custom Fields in WordPress, combined with a bit of theme customization.

Normally, you would insert the title of a page like this:

<?php the_title(); ?>

Instead, you can create a custom field. We’ll call it “custompagetitle” for this example. On the FAQ page, you would enter ‘FAQ” as the title of the page, then a custom field called “custompagetitle” and enter “Frequently Asked Questions” there. Then, instead of the previously mentioned code, insert this code:

<?php

// See if there's a custom field custompagetitle,
// and if so, use it as the page's title

$realtitles = get_post_custom_values('custompagetitle');

if (is_array($realtitles)) {

$realtitle = implode($realtitles);

}

if ($realtitle)

echo $realtitle;

else

the_title();

?>

Not only does this code use your custom heading, but if there is no custom heading, it will default to the actual page title.