If you’ve upgraded to WordPress 3.0 and are using a compatible theme, you’re probably ready to learn about the custom menu for WordPress 3.0 sites! This feature is one of my favorites from the latest release of the WordPress platform. If you haven’t yet figured it out, check out this tutorial for WordPress Custom Menus.
Add your desired pages and categories, then head to Appearance/Menus. Name your navigation bar and save it. Then, in the left hand side of the editor, select the pages and categories you’d like to show on your menu. Click Add To Menu for each section and see your selections appear to the right.
Next, drag and drop your selections into the order you’d like. You can make some items appear on submenus by dragging them slightly right before letting go.
If you’d like to add custom/external links to your WordPress menu, you can do that here as well. Just type in the url and menu item title, and add it!
Drag, Drop, Repeat!
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About Erica Mueller
This is a great demonstration Erica. WordPress just keeps getting better and better.
Very nice tutorial, Erica!
Drag & drop is the way to go, making it all sooo easy.
Thanks Erica, this all looks great. However, how do I choose to place my menu anywhere on my site? Like for example on a page.php ? What code would I need for this?
At the moment I get the following message when I enter my menus page in the admin:
The current theme does not natively support menus, but you can use the “Custom Menu” widget to add any menus you create here to the theme’s sidebar.
However, while this works with widgets, I'd rather not use widgets and place the menus anywhere I like – is this possible?
Many thanks,
Michael
Michael,
I'm pretty sure you'll need a theme that's built to accommodate custom menus, but you may be able to find a tutorial out there that will show you how to replace your theme's current navigation with a custom one. The other thing you might do, before switching themes, is ask the developer of your current theme if they plan to make the theme 3.0 compatible any time soon.
Hey Erica,
Do you know how to add a “placeholder” in the menu?
Say for instance I want one of the “parent” labels on the menu to be “geekness,” which is just for show- it’s not a page, category or external link, and its children are “nerd” (a page), “dweeb” (a category) and “freakazoid” (external link).
I know how to add the page, category and external link elements to my custom menu, but I thought I heard Matt Mullenweg describe being able to put placeholders in the menus as well in his State of the Word 2010 keynote at Wordcamp San Francisco.
Just thought I would ask. Thanks for any light you can shed on this!
Adding a placeholder is pretty easy!
In the custom menu area, where you can add a link to your navigation,
put in yourdomain.com/#
The # sign tells the ‘link’ to stay on the page, so this won’t take your
visitors anywhere.
Then, add what you want to the menu and drag it up under the placeholder
you’ve created!
You do not even need the yourdomain.com/ part.
If you enter # in the url field and your label name in the label field, it will work in the same way.
Oh, cool! I hadn’t tried that. Good to know!
What a great tutorial! Thanks for sharing!!!
what a great tutorial Erica… !!
thanks a lot….
Glad you found it helpful! If you have any other WordPress things you’d like to see covered I’m always open to ideas!
You’re welcome!
Thanks you so much for this great tutorial! I am new to blogging and WordPress and have been struggling for days with this and your explanation and video made it so easy to understand. Thank you!!
I’m so glad it helped you, Laura!
Hey Erica,
I’m having a problem with my custom nav menu. For some reason it is not showing on the index but if I click on a post it shows up. Any ideas? Here is what I have in functions:
register_nav_menu( ‘primary’, __( ‘Primary Menu’, ‘ionews20′ ) );
and in header:
<?php wp_nav_menu( array( ‘theme_location’ => ‘primary’ ) ); ?>
Margot,
I am not sure on that. Right now I’m just using custom menus on themes that have that ability built in. You might check your theme settings and see if there is something to check for showing the menu on the home page. If you still can’t get it, check the theme author’s site for a help or support forum.
So helpful for a new blogger; thanks!!
Kathleen, I am so glad you found it useful. Every single month it’s one of my top visited posts and it makes me happy to know that my little tutorial helps so many people!
Hello Erica,
I’m not sure what you mean by this:
Add your desired pages and categories, then head to Appearance/Menus.
Add them to what please?
Diane
Under Pages, create pages you’d like to have show up on your menu. Under Posts, create some categories.
This way when you go to the Menu settings to create a menu you’ll have categories and pages to choose from to build your menus.
That’s great, thanks Erica