Menus

A Quick Note on Menu Limitations and Capabilities

Menus are composed of headers and links. The headers are followed by a downward arrow to indicate that they contain a dropdown to an extended menu. This is behavior is typical for website navigation. However, at the time of this writing, WordPress only
allows you to add one level of nesting.

In order to support more nested levels, and navigation that is specific to only certain pages within a website, the Web Team created the More Nav functionality. This functionality — which we will discuss more later on this tutorial — allows the user to create unlimited levels of nesting for navigation, but it does have its limitations.

Add a Menu to Your WordPress Site

Finding the Menu Editing Page

  1. Go to your Dashboard
  2. Go to Appearance > Menus
  3. Notice under Menu Structure there is a set of boxes with the names of the pages in your site. This is a default menu WordPress created. You can edit this menu — scroll down to Editing Menu Items — or create a new menu.

Adding a New Menu

  1. On the top left of the page, under Edit Menus, click the linked text create a new menu
  2. Enter the name of the new menu in the Menu Name box.
  3. Click the Save Menu button

Adding Items to the Menu

  1. Choose one of the options to the left. Either Pages, Posts, Custom Links, or Categories. NOTE: In most cases you will use Pages to link to existing pages in your site or Custom Links for external pages.
  2. If you are looking to add a new post or page look under the Most Recent button, select the page/post by clicking on the square next to the title, and press the Add to Menu button.
  3. If you have too many pages in your site it may be easier to click on the Search tab, and enter the page title
  4. Now following these instructions add at least one item to the menu
  5. Click the Save Menu button

Creating Nested Menu Items/Menu Headers

  1. Once you create two or more items you can drag an item under another item
  2. Notice that the item on top will now become a header — this means that it will no longer link to a page, but only serve as a header to items listed under it.
  3. NOTE: you can only create one level of nested items using this method. If you attempt to make a submenu item into a header by adding other items under it, WordPress will ignore the items under that item.
  4. To accomplish multi-level nesting scroll down to More Nav or Additional Menus

Editing Menu Items

  1. Under Menu Structure notice two things:
    1. The instruction that tells you to “drag each item into the order you prefer “. You will notice that the menu items are organized as boxes that can be dragged to the preferred position by clicling and dragging them up or down
    2. The arrow to the right of the post type –“Page “, “Post “, etc. — expands the options for that item.
  2. Click on the downward arrow on the right of the menu item box to expand options
  3. Change the value of the Navigation Label
  4. Notice you can varify that the item is the correct one by clicking on the linked text next to where it saysOriginal
  5. You can remove the item by pressing the Remove button
  6. You can cancel your edit by pressing the Cancel button

Menu Settings

  1. Auto add pages: just as the name implies, this option will automatically add to your menu any new top-level pages.
  2. Primary Menu: check this option if you would like to make this your primary menu. The primary menu will appear on all pages.

More Nav or Additional Menus

Additional menus can be added to specific pages and their child pages. These menus will appear in addition to the main menu.

This functionality can be used for two purposes:

  1. Creating navigation with multiple levels of nested headers
  2. Creating navigation specific to only a set of pages within a website

Using More Nav

  1. After you created a menu and set it to be the Primary follow the steps above to create secondary menus. Note that the main difference is that you can have multiple levels of nesting.
  2. Once you have created a secondary menu, go to the editor on the page you would like to use it in.
  3. On the page editor scroll down to the box on the right side entitled “More Nav”
  4. Click on the drop down labeled “Display Library Hours for:” and choose the appropriate menu.