Missing current_page_parent css class for custom post types

I’m having the same problem as well, and have spent quite a while searching for a solution with no luck. Having no way to define a parent of a custom post type really limits their usefulness.

Hi Brig01
Your solution works but the button “blog” in the menu still have the css class “current_page_parent” so it remains highlighted..
Does anyone know how to solve it? Thank

I might have found a solution. It works but have not tested it in a real world scenario yet so please do your own testing first. It involves conditional stylesheets.

In header.php put a new conditional tag:

<?php if (is_singular('CPT-NAME')) { ?>
    	<link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" media="screen" href="<?php bloginfo('template_url'); ?>/path/to/stylesheet.css" />
    <?php } ?>

CPT-NAME is your custom post type name, like newsletters or offers.
Also reference the stylesheet you create in the next step.

The separate stylesheet then got this in it which is my menu highlight css. Adjust to your own styles. Change menu-item-220 to your -menu-item-#. Use firebug or Google Chrome to find this number.

#menu-item-220 a
{
	background: #000;
	color: #a0a0a0;
	margin: 5px 0;
	padding: 5px;
	-moz-border-radius: 5px;
	-webkit-border-radius: 5px;
	border-radius: 5px;
	border-left: 1px solid #000;
	border-top: 1px solid #000;
	border-right: 1px solid #222;
	border-bottom: 1px solid #222;
}

Now this stylesheet will only be picked up when a page from your custom post type in the conditional tag above is true.

So far this works ok as a workaround. But as I said there might be scenarios where this doesn’t work.

I’m also using this pretty successfully on a few sites, though I’ve cut out the individual css files. I have my main style.css file for my theme which has all my nav css in it and the only thing I need to edit on a per-post-type basis is the menu highlighting, so I thought a whole new file was a bit bulky for what I need.

So- I used your condition code in the header, but expanded it to cover 4 custom types I have and added <style> HTML tags around it.

<!--  This adds support for current page highlighting with custom posts -->
	<style>

	<?php if (is_singular('issue')) { ?>
    	#menu-item-500 a {

	<?php } elseif (is_singular('news')) { ?>
		#menu-item-300 a {

	<?php } elseif (is_singular('videos')) { ?>
		#menu-item-250 a {

	<?php } elseif (is_singular('testimonial')) { ?>
		#menu-item-254 a {

	<?php } ?>
	color: #ff8608;
			}
	</style>
	<!-- end nav styling -->

Hopefully this is useful for some others as well!

Just an FYI, WP 3.1 adds the archive feature for CPTs. Which negates needed to create your own template to display your CPTs.

When I tested thsi on my dev install, it worked perfectly and also assigned the proper class in the css.

Before that I had the same problem with my CPT pages

If you are using twentyten as a base theme/parent theme then all you need to do is use the body class it prints out as a hook. So looking at acafourek’s example above my comment: ‘single-issue’ would be one of the body classes. So the css rule you place in your stylesheet for the issue post content type is:

.single-issue #menu-item-500 a {
/*css properties here*/
}