Perishable Press

This article explains how to reverse the order of WordPress page navigation links.

To reverse the default (backward) order of page navigation in WordPress, open the file template-functions-links.php (in WP 2.0) or link-template.php (in WP 2.1/2.2) and scroll down to the last function, posts_nav_link() ¹. Next, find the last if statement and switch the order of the following two lines:

previous_posts_link($prelabel);
   [ ignore this line ]
next_posts_link($nxtlabel, $max_page);

Next, within the first line of the same function (beginning with function posts_nav_link), switch the order of the variables $prelabel='« Previous Page' and $nxtlabel='Next Page »'.

Finally, within the loop, make sure you are calling the function with the usual parameters in place. Something like:

<?php posts_nav_link(' | ','&laquo; Previous Entries','Next Entries &raquo;') ?>

That’s it! Your post navigation links (for index and category views) should now operate according to the following principle: left links point to older posts and right links post to newer posts.

References

• ¹ Not to be confused with previous_post_link() and next_post_link(), which provide navigational links to older individual posts and newer individual posts, respectively. Oddly enough, in the case of post-by-post navigation, WordPress gets it right: left links point to older posts and right links post to newer posts; however, this is not the case with page-by-page navigation, in which WordPress adopts the reverse strategy.