brendaegeland

A common web design pattern is to have a primary navigation with the top level pages, and then a separate 
navigation element on each page that shows only those pages related to a common top-most page. This widget helps 
to build those secondary navigation elements.
If your page structure was like this:
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>About</li>
<li>— Our History</li>
<li>— Our Staff</li>
<li>— — Employment Opportunities</li>
<li>Services</li>
<li>— Widget Development</li>
<li>— Gadget Deployment</li>
<li>Contact Us</li>
</ul>
and you added the widget with its default settings to a sidebar, it would create a list like this:
<ul>
<li>About</li>
<li>Our History</li>
<li>Our Staff</li>
<li>— Employment Opportunities</li>
</ul>
on any of the pages in the About subtree. Notice that the top-most ancestor, About, is included as the first element of the list.
<h4>Options</h4>
<ol>
<li>Title. The widget title. If left blank, it defaults to the title of the top ancestor page.</li>
<li>Show Title. Maybe you don’t want a title. Just turn it off here.</li>
<li>Top Page. You can select one of your pages to be the top page, or you can choose Default, which determines the top-most ancestor of the page being displayed.</li>
<li>Menu Class. Gets applied to the outermost <ul> element.</li>
<li>Before Links. HTML to be inserted before links in the list.</li>
<li>After Links. HTML to be inserted after links in the list.</li>
</ol>

Subpages in Context

Lists pages and subpages for a given page, or the top ancestor of the current page and all of the ancestor's descendants

Nile Flores

WP Subpages Widget is a simple plugin to allow for multiple instances to show child pages. For people who use multiple template files for each of their site’s pages, having the capability of using a widget, rather than hardcode subpages of a parent or child page.
While the WordPress 3.0 Menu System allows users to be able to create a menu system with child pages, this plugin works with the natural Page hierarchy. It’s great for sections of the website that have sub pages like alphabetical pages, and more.

WP Subpages

WP Subpages Widget is a simple plugin to allow for multiple instances to show child pages.

Subpages in Context vs WP Subpages