a wordpress function that allows you to grab a page or custom post type by its slug. Originally from Matheus Eduardo http://wordpress.stackexchange.com/users/3575/matheus-eduardo

gistfile1.txt

function get_page_by_slug($page_slug, $output = OBJECT, $post_type = 'page' ) {
    global $wpdb;
    $page = $wpdb->get_var( $wpdb->prepare( "SELECT ID FROM $wpdb->posts WHERE post_name = %s AND post_type= %s", $page_slug, $post_type ) );
    if ( $page )
            return get_page($page, $output);
    return null;
}