The WordPress codex is full of fun little things that you can experiment with. Have you ever wanted to remove a menu page from the WordPress dashboard? Perhaps you’re building a site for a client who gets confused by the settings menu. Blow the dust off of your handy codex and check out the function references for removing menu pages.
Here’s what you’re looking for:
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Replace the menu slug with the name of the php script for the menu item you want to remove.
The standard menu in WordPress, while powerful and easy to add onto almost any theme, leaves a bit to be desired when it comes to styling.
Not to mention, the built-in WordPress menu classes can be quite confusing. There’s menu-item-type-taxonomy, current-menu-parent, current-menu-ancestor, and a whole bunch of other confusion selectors you can choose from to make styling your menu about as fun as pulling out your hair.
A standard WordPress menu looks like this:
Gray bar with a darker gray hover. Not too much to look at right?
Using the built in WordPress navigation menus is the most convenient way to handle custom menus since the 3.0 release. Since then, developers have written all kinds of plugins to add additional functionality to this theme feature.
If Menu is the latest plugin written to extend WordPress navigation menus. It allows you to show or hide individual menu items based on conditional statements, such as whether or not a user is logged in, various user roles, and the type of content being viewed, (ie, front page, single, page).
It’s easier than you might think.
Adding icons to WordPress custom menus is a relatively simple 2-step process that does not involve any php coding whatsoever. None. Zip. Nada. Zilch. All we need to do is upload the icons we want to use to our WordPress media library, and then futz with the CSS to get stuff looking awesome.
WordPress offers an excellent way to manage your site’s menus, but it may not be apparent when you first install your site. In fact, a fresh installation doesn’t use the easy menu system at all–you have to hook that up yourself. Follow along as I show you the menu system basics and how to start using it on your new site.
Watch and learn
Working with the original WordPress menus
WordPress menus for everyone
Global navigation menus became much easier to manage when WordPress version 3 added a snazzy menu manager–no plugin or JavaScript required. Every now and then, you may want to use an oldie-but-goodie theme that has not been updated to support WordPress menus. I’ll show you how to easily add menu support to these older themes.
Some old themes still have punch
WordPress offers you a lot of styling options for your menu right out of the box. By default, the menu comes with a ton of CSS classes applied to it already, which gives you immense control on styling it.
Here’s a full list of all the CSS menu classes:
.menu-item – This class is added to every menu item.
.menu-item-object-{object} – This class is added to every menu item, where {object} is either a post type or a taxonomy.
.menu-item-object-category – This class is added to menu items that correspond to a category.
Working with WordPress menus is usually very easy with its drag and drop interface. However, there may be times when you need to do something unique with one or more of the links. For example, you may need one of your links to open in a new window. What you need are the advanced menu properites.
Where to Find the Advanced Menu Properties:
Search “WordPress menu plugins” in Google = Eeek!
A quick search for WordPress menu plugins in Google will bring up over 32,000,000 results. Oh, dear Lord! Dozens, if not hundreds, of those results can be quite mouth-watering at first glance. But sifting through the mess of unappetizing stuff to find something satisfying can be frustrating to say the least. Even searching the WordPress plugin repository can be quite tedious.
Here’s a simple tip that may be useful to you if you’re just getting started with creating your own WordPress site. Sometimes when you’re setting up a dropdown menu with the built-in WordPress menu system you may want the top level item to be unclickable although still show the subnav items beneath.
