Allow get_pages to exclude by slug in addition to id

[richcon]

Currently, get_pages() allows template authors to exclude certain pages from the result, by their ID. It's more useful to exclude by slug when the IDs aren't immediately known.

For example, on a WordPress site I recently made, I coded an automatically-generated menu listing the site's pages and their subpages. There are certain classes of pages I want to exclude, and hard-coding the page IDs into my menu code just isn't a good way to do it. Excluding by page slug works beautifully.

Patch: I've included a patch to add this functionality. It is a very short addition to wp-includes/post.php (one new line and two altered lines), has been well used on my (now live) site, and adds a very useful feature.

Syntax: The syntax is identical to the old use, except that where the "exclude" parameter only accepted numbers, it now can take strings. If the value given is not a number, it's treated as a slug. If it is a number, it's treated as an ID like before. For example:

$subPages = get_pages('hierarchical=0&exclude=sidebar&parent='.$page->ID);

will get subpages of $page that don't have the "sidebar" slug. (Numerical values are still treated as IDs, and lists can contain any number of IDs and slugs to exclude.)

Patch to post.php (get_pages) to allow excluding by slug

pages-exclude-by-slug.diff tested and working. Tested on nightly build

This will treat numeric slugs as IDs.

IDs must use %d.

Punting due to feature freeze. Reconsider with next release.

My patch introduces the exclude_slugs argument. It is probably the only way to eliminate the numerical slugs issue.

use IN and NOT IN instead of a series of AND id <> %s, handle exclude_slugs and include_slugs

use IN and NOT IN instead of a series of AND id <> %s, handle exclude_slugs and include_slugs