Recently I was setting up a WordPress blog and needed to use the default pages widget to list a certain set amount of pages. On this blog I used the NextGEN Gallery for dozens of different galleries. The issue was that I wanted to only list a couple of pages using the default Pages widget and when using NGG I would have dozens if not hundreds of pages that I would need to exclude with the default Pages widget. So what I needed to do was include a couple of page ID’s instead of excluding hundreds of page ID’s.

The problem above can be accomplished by making one minor adjustment to one WordPress file. We will need to modify the wp_pages_widget PHP function to include the pages specified in the admin versus excluding them.

File to Modify: <wp-root-directory>/wp-includes/widgets.php
Line: 682

Replace The Below:

$out = wp_list_pages( array('title_li' => '', 'echo' => 0, 'sort_column' => $sortby, 'exclude' => $exclude) );

With:

$out = wp_list_pages( array('title_li' => '', 'echo' => 0, 'sort_column' => $sortby, 'include' => $exclude) );

Notice you only modify one exclude with include. Do not change each instance! So now whatever Page ID’s you enter into the “Exclude” configuration box under the Pages Widget will be included instead of excluded. If you want to also modify the below line in the same file to display Include in the Pages Widget instead of Exclude.

File: <wp-root-directory>/wp-includes/widgets.php
Line: 734

Replace:

<label for="pages-exclude"><?php _e( 'Exclude:' ); ?> <input type="text" value="<?php echo $exclude; ?>" name="pages-exclude" id="pages-exclude" cla        ss="widefat" /></label>

With:

<label for="pages-exclude"><?php _e( 'Include:' ); ?> <input type="text" value="<?php echo $exclude; ?>" name="pages-exclude" id="pages-exclude" cla        ss="widefat" /></label>

Again the only thing you are changing out is Exclude: with Include:.

Some people may search for the wp_list_pages function to accomplish the same goal but I found it much easier to modify the wp_pages_widget since it will be rare for me to ever use the wp_list_pages PHP function again.

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