Can a menu structure be imported?

Hi David

Perhaps someone else will offer a better solution, but if it were me I would be tempted to just create a loop and put that in a widget where I want the menu displayed instead of using the WP custom menu function.

Using a loop means that, depending on how your books are categorized and assuming that stays the same, your books could come and go and your menu would still work.

In order to create a loop, we’d need to know more about how your books and the associated levels and parts are stored in your database – using a custom post type and metadata I assume?

That said, perhaps there are easier ways to do this and I only say this because it sounds like you may be missing out on what is essentially the greatest power of WP, which is to organize content using taxonomies, or via page hierarchies.

Alternatively, if you’re happy with the way the content is stored and you just want to craft a list of links *that will not change much, if at all, over time*, then you could also just create the HTML to build your menu structure and either put that in a widget OR in your header.php where the Theme would naturally call your menu.

If you don’t mind more questions, how are the levels and parts structured? Hierarchical custom taxonomies?

E.G.
Book Title 1
– Level 1
– Part 1
– Part 2
– Part 3
– Part 4
– Level 2
– Part 1 (assuming this would have a different slug than the first part 1)
– Part 2
– Part 3
– Part 4
etc.
Book Title 2
– Level 1
– Part 1
And so on…..?

If this is the case, then a loop that first gets all the taxonomies, and then queries for all of your CPT “books” for those that have those terms assigned may work.

That said, I’m not sure that get_terms includes ‘depth’ as a parameter, meaning it may not handle this many levels of terms – I use it for single-level taxonomy queries, BUT if it won’t do depth, you *could* just repeat the “get_terms” part using “child_of” and hard-coding the taxonomy ID for each one….then you’d only need to modify your loop IF you add or change parent taxonomies.

SO I just used this example for another person in the forum who is doing something different, but with a similar solution – in this code I use get_terms to get all the terms within a specific custom taxonomy (in my case, it’s ‘retail_category’, if your terms are as above, then in your case it might be ‘book_title’). Once I have all the terms, the for each term, I do a query to find all the posts within a CPT that have that term assigned, and I echo the post title(s).

$terms = get_terms( 'retail_category', array('orderby' => 'name', 'order' => 'ASC') );
   if ($terms) {
     foreach($terms as $term) {
     $args = array(
      'post_type' => 'retail',
      'posts_per_page' => -1,
      'ignore_sticky_posts' => 1,
      'orderby' => 'title',
      'order' => 'ASC',
      'tax_query' => array(
            array(
            'taxonomy' => 'retail_category',
            'field' => 'name',
            'terms' => $term->name)
      )
    );
    global $post;
    $myposts = new WP_Query($args);
      if ( $myposts->have_posts() ) {
        echo '<ul><li><h5 class="retailcatname">' . $term->name . '</h5><ul>';
        while( $myposts->have_posts() ) : ($myposts->the_post());
           echo '<li><a href="<?php the_permalink() ?>">';
           echo the_title();
           echo '</a></li>';
         endwhile;
        echo '</ul></li></ul>';
   }
 }
}

Instead of just echoing the titles, you’d also want to wrap it in some div tags using the WP navigation selectors so you can style it to look menu-like.

If you modify this and it works, then you have a few options for how to get it on your page – you could create a template file that you call in your header, like so:

include(STYLESHEETPATH . '/_menutop.php');

Using an underscore will keep this file at the top of your template files in your Theme Editor, so you can quick find and modify it as needed.

OR you could put it in a widget and place the widget in a widget area you’ve in your header.php…..OR you could put it in your functions.php (or better yet, a my-functions.php that you put in your plugins folder and activate) then either use a shortcode or just the PHP function where you need it, with or without using a widget.

I hope this helps….

Isn’t it fun when you’re learning new stuff? 🙂

It sounds like you have a good understanding – but I’d like to repeat back to you what I’m getting to be sure we’re both on the same page.

Your CPT is ‘products’ (although it’s considered good practice to name your CPTs by their singular, not plural, instance), and you have two custom taxonomies, ‘studies by topic’ and ‘studies by level’. Within each of those two custom taxonomies you have parent terms and child terms.

I still think this is very do-able, but it sounds like you will have to nest in another level to get the ‘child’ terms for each (parent) term – WP has a function for this, it’s “get_term_children”…you can read about it here:

https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/get_term_children

I haven’t monkeyed about with that much yet because my taxonomies are flat, but the examples on that page are pretty good.

OR it might be simpler, given that you have only two custom taxonomies, to consider two menu structures, allowing site visitors to browse the title by *either* Topic or Level. Then you could do a simple single taxonomy loop, but repeat it, and hard code in the taxonomy each time.

If you get stuck after looking at the examples at that link, post back and I’ll have a crack at some code – no guarantees but we should be able to get you there.