Replacing Next and Previous Page Links with Pagination

The problem. By default, WordPress has functions to display links to previous and next pages. This is better than nothing, but I don’t understand why the folks at WordPress don’t build a paginator by default. Sure, there are plug-ins to create pagination, but what about inserting it directly in your theme?

The solution. To achieve this hack, we’ll use the WP-PageNavi plug-in and insert it directly in our theme.

1. The first thing to do, obviously, is download the plug-in.
2. Unzip the plug-in archive on your hard drive, and upload the wp-pagenavi.php and wp-pagenavi.css files to your theme directory.
3. Open the file that you want the pagination to be displayed in (e.g. index.php, categories.php, search.php, etc.), and find the following code:

<div class="navigation">
<div class="alignleft"><?php next_posts_link('Previous entries') ?></div>
<div class="alignright"><?php previous_posts_link('Next entries') ?></div>
</div>

Replace this part with the code below:

<?php
include('wp-pagenavi.php');
if(function_exists('wp_pagenavi')) { wp_pagenavi(); }
?>
<pre>
 
Now we have to hack the plug-in file. To do so, open the <em>wp-pagenavi.php</em> file and find the following line (line #61):
 
<pre lang="php">function wp_pagenavi($before = '', $after = '') {
        global $wpdb, $wp_query;

We have to call the pagenavi_init() function, so let’s do it this way:

function wp_pagenavi($before = '', $after = '') {
	global $wpdb, $wp_query;
        pagenavi_init(); //Calling the pagenavi_init() function

We’re almost done. The last thing to do is to add the wp-pagenavi style sheet to your blog. To do so, open up header.php and add the following line:

<link rel="stylesheet" href="<?php echo TEMPLATEPATH.'/pagenavi.css';?>" type="text/css" media="screen" />

Code explanation. This hack mostly consists of simply including the plug-in file directly in the theme file. We also had to add a call to the pagenavi_init() function to make sure the pagination would be properly displayed.