So, I started exploring the whole family in Wordpress – grandparents, parents, and children. Translation for those not yet used to seeing Wordpress analagous to the family in My Big Fat Greek Wedding: Pages, sub-pages, and sub-sub pages

Simple Directory Setup

• Directory Page (grandparent): Displays list of Non-Profit Organization Categories (ex. social, environment, health, etc.)
• Category Page (parent): Show title and excerpt of each Organization within a category (ex. Environment Organizations)
• Single Organization Page (child/current): Show content about a single organization(ex. SaveTheEarth – made up org for this example)

Here’s how to do it

1. Create a Page Called Directory. This will be the Directory Page (grandparent)
2. Find the Page ID. Let’s say the Page ID = 5. Depending on how you want to display the category info, you can
3. Manually add the name of each category, a short description and a link
4. Open up page.php so we can setup The Category Page (Parent Page). We want to show title and excerpts of each organization for each category.
5. Add this code to page.php – Checks if we’re on a sub page / child page of the Directory (Page ID =10) and if so, list the pages in alphabetical order with excerpts. For the excerpt, I’m using the plugin Limit Posts since it didn’t work with The Excerpt Reloaded.<?php
   $current = $post->ID;
   $parent = $post->post_parent;
   $grandparent_get = get_post($parent);
   $grandparent = $grandparent_get->post_parent;
   ?>

   <?php if ( $post->post_parent==”10″   ){ ?>
   <?php $pageChildren = $wpdb->get_results(“SELECT *    FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_parent = “.$post->ID.”    AND post_type = ‘page’ ORDER BY post_title ASC”, ‘OBJECT’);    ?>

   <h2 class=”titles”><a href=”<? php echo get_permalink($pageChild->ID);  ?>”> <? php echo $pageChild->post_title;  ?></a></h2>

   <?php the_content_limit(280, “”); ?><div class=”readmore”><a href=”<?php echo get_permalink($pageChild->ID); ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <? php echo $pageChild->post_title;   ?>”>Read More &raquo;</a></div>

   (make sure to delete the space between <? and php -  I had to to do that so it wouldn’t execute in this post)

6. Single Organization Page (Child Page) On page.php, after the code you added in step 5, add this code that will check to see if we’re on the grandchild page. This will be the actual organization’s page. In our example, the SaveTheEarth Page. This is very helpful information in case you want to add a different style or add special items in the sidebar, etc.
   <?php if ( $pageChildren ) : foreach ( $pageChildren as $pageChild ) : setup_postdata( $pageChild ); ?>

7. Set up how the rest of the pages on your site will look:

On page.php, after the code in step 6, add this code which instructs every other page in the site to act normally and display the content

<?php endforeach; ?>
<?php else : ?>

<?php the_content(); ?>
<?php  endif; ?>

You can see the full page.php code here

You can see the directory in action here

I figured this out using the following helpful posts:

* http://wordpress.org/support/topic/186206
* http://wpguru.co.za/page/display-title-excerpt-of-child-page

According to the official Wordpress site, Wordpress Plugins directory search is no longer a big mess, and can actually help you find the plugin you’re looking for. Last week I think I did a search for “video” and got results like contact form, social bookmarking, etc. and had to resort to a Google search. But now the search brings up much better results and is a great resource.

Wordpress improved the search using Sphinx (a “free open-source SQL full-text search engine”) to power the search from the plugins directory and from your blog’s admin area (Plugins>add new)

All I can say, is, give it another chance and you may just find a great plugin from the 4,245 available.