In this example, we are going to find all of the pages under the /blog page. This is a common use of the page list model. The PageList class is not automatically loaded by concrete5, so we will need to use the Loader class to have it available to us.

If your site does not have a page located at /blog, it would be helpful to create that page, as well as a few child pages below it. Otherwise, feel free to adapt the code in this recipe to suit your needs.

In this recipe, we will get a list of 20 pages that exist under /blog in the sitemap. The steps are as follows:

The PageList class extends the core DatabaseItemList class, which has a number of useful functions itself. The get() function accepts two parameters, the number of records to retrieve, and the offset.

The page list class implements "magic methods," which allow allow us to filter the list by any page attribute. We simply need to create a function name based off of the camel cased version of the attribute handle, preceded by "filterBy". So to filter all pages that have the exclude_nav attribute, we would write the following function:

$list->filterByExcludeNav(true);

Alternatively, if you want to just get an array of the first 99 Page objects and ignore pagination, use the get() function.

$pages = $list->get(99);

Since version 5.5, concrete5 uses Twitter's open source Bootstrap CSS framework for many of their internal styles. You can get the pagination controls in nicely formatted HTML (with relevant Bootstrap CSS classes) by printing/echoing the results of the following function (preferably you'd use this function in a view or template file of a block or single page):

echo $list->displayPagingV2();

The DatabaseItemList class and PageList class have several functions that make working with a collection of pages easier. You can filter by keywords, by collection type, parent page, and by any attribute using magic methods. We will cover the DatabaseItemList class further in Chapter 5, Working with Databases and Models.