first of all I want to say this is a very usefull thing to know. Thank you!
But…I’ve got a problem with the hack because I want to use it in my header.php to generate a dropdown-navigation which includes small discriptions.
Everything works fine. The discription appears where it should.
They are the smaller words are under the main menue points:

http://annettes.alfahosting.org/MLI/

But when I visit a subpage the discription disappears.

Why does this happen?
Has anyone a idea to solve this?

Thank you…

any help would be great.

Can I use the field I grab from META to sort the pages? In my case the meta tag is price and I would like to sort my pages by the price.

Thanks

I just modified it a bit, so that you can control which meta var to pull in, directly from your post/page.

instead of passing a boolean to start_el to tell it whether to look for “description”, you can simply pass it the name of the meta var:
update_option(‘get_meta’, “Location”);

Then in the start_el you could do something like this:
$get_meta = get_option(“get_meta”);
if($get_meta!=”"){
$meta_var = get_post_meta($page->ID, “$get_meta”, true);
if ($page->ID != $current_page){
$output .= ” “;
if (!$meta_var){
$meta_var = strip_tags(substr($page->post_content, 0, 250));
}
$output .= $meta_var;
}
}

it’s all I need at the moment (more than 1 set of meta vars) but this could be extended to accept an array of elements… Then it would be ready to be made into a plugin!