Why you should use pagebar for your blog

You may ask yourself “Why should I use pagebar, the newer versions of the WordPress default themes already contain page navigation.” Here an example that may convince you that pagebar is the better choice.

Let’s take a look at a multi paged post with many, really many pages:

Twenty-Ten

Twenty-Ten is my all-time favourite, seems nobody ever thought that there may be a post with more than 12 pages:

Twenty-Eleven

Next year the layout was much better:

Twenty-Twelve

The latest default theme seems to have no layout for paged posts at all (though there is a bit CSS used for the list):

Despite the layout mayhem: does a user really wants to go to page 73, or 99? (OK, maybe the user got an email “Look at page 73”). Isn’t it more likely that the user wants to go to the next or previous page, skip two pages or go to the last page?

Change!

Here’s the same post with the default settings of pagebar:

This looks much better, even for posts with many pages. Of course you can change many aspects of the layout of the pagebar in the settings. As a bonus you get a button for displaying all parts of the post, WordPress does not contain this by default.
For those who want to allow the user to select a specific page, pagebar v3 will contain a hierarchical dropdown list for easy access.

Use pagebar! You can download it from the WordPress repository.