WordPress.org

Author: Aidan Curran

As well as being the leading blogging platform, WordPress is also one of the most flexible and easy to use general purpose content management systems for a wide variety of websites. However, one important CMS feature that is missing in the 'out of the box' installation of WordPress is a navigation menu management interface. A number of attempts have been made at plugins to address this need but most have been overly complex or cumbersome in some way so I have always coded my own navigation systems into my website templates.

After experimenting with a few different approaches for building navigation menus for a number of different websites, I discovered that WordPress actually does have an interface for managing navigation menus - well 'sorta'... I found that one good approach to creating navigation menus that could be easily managed by my clients is to use WordPress's built in links management interface. All it takes is a few lines of PHP code in the header template file to utilise the links navagation interface for the purpose of managing the website navigation menu. I have used this approach for building single level and multiple level navigation menus.

Now I have turned this approach to navigation menus into a simple plugin. This initial version adds the template tag 'show_nav()' which generates a single level navigation menu from the links contained in a 'nav' category. It is intended for use by users who create or edit their own templates. A multi-level version may follow.