WordPress 3.0-Adding New Navigational Menu To Themes From Appearance

WordPress 3.0 released with a bang on June 17^th 2010. The most sought out edition with numerous additions and editions which takes WordPress again to the top of the best CMS platforms to exist till date. WordPress 3.0 gives extreme power to the user to modify the look and feel and appearance of the theme to their will. All it needs from the user is to know which file and where to configure or edit in order to accomplish the required or needed task.

Today lets learn on how to add a new navigational menu to the theme. This menu can point to individual posts or pages or even categories and tags. You name it and we can point the menu item to any external source too. Configuring the menu is very easy and lets look how.

First you need to have WordPress 3.0 installed and running as your blog platform(sounds silly, but it’s a pre-requisite). Lets move on step wise to accomplish the task. So, you logged in.

1. Go to Appearance->Menus sub item in order to start creating a menu.


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2. From the above screen, you can point out ‘Create New Menu’ button awaiting the Menu name. Give any name you wish to refer the menu as. I would give ‘Categories’ as I am going to create a menu for all the categories on my blog. Check the following images.


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3. You can see that I have created a new menu called ‘Categories’. Now, what’s a menu without any items to show? How do I add all my categories or most popular categories to this menu.


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4. Now that we have a menu called Categories, lets add a few items to this menu. On the left side of the page, you can seen different boxes signifying the different kind of items that can be attached to the menu.

Theme locations specifies the location where you can add the newly created Menu on your blog. The location signifies and as well as positions the menu in an ad-hoc manner which as a blogger, we need to perform the CSS mods to set it in the right place. The newly created menu has to be manually edited and added to the functions.php file. This might be a hindrance to the code-avoiding bloggers who just need a look and feel of the nav menu just by creating it.

I suppose in the newly being created wordpress themes, this feature would be implemented by default so that the new navigational menus would reflect on the blog automatically. This means that there would be no human intervention in projecting the newly created menu on to the blog’s navigational pattern. The bloggers can even create the top-level pages in order to utilize them for SEO purposes and weightage with the search engines.

Custom links(in the fig. above) are used to direct the URL to any external source or to point the menu item to any internal pages or blog posts and even any particular hidden category. The member ship sites can make good use of this feature because the user could be made to login explicitly in order to access this navigational menu’s sub-item and find any resource page.

All it needs to configure can be located in the navigational templates and as well as utilizing the registration and login plugins in order to secure the given menu item.

Pages(in the fig.) section provides you to direct the menu items to point new pages or existing pages which are either ‘Most Recent’ or you can ‘View All’ and even embed ‘Search’ among the several existing pages and point the URL to this page.

Categories(in the fig.) provides the same facility to choose from the ‘Most Used’ categories or you can choose from several categories by viewing all of them and selecting them using the check boxes provided and you can even search from various other categories and choose from several.

After you choose from the several options available, do not forget to ‘Save Menu’ so that this menu can get updated and displayed on the screen.

WordPress 3.0 comes with a default theme called Twenty Ten(2010) which can serve upto a single navigational menu item. If you need to add several menus, then you need to edit the wp-includes/nav-menu-template.php.

You need to register the newly created menu using the default navigational menu code as

<?php wp_nav_menu(); ?>

We shall discuss on how to include the navigational menu created at the preferred location in the next post.