Creative and Strategy Services for Progressive Organizations

Welcome to Vernal.

Drupal > Wordpress migration part II: The ultimate Wordpress menu manager

In my quest to convert CERF to Wordpress (see previous entry), I have run across the best menu manager I have ever seen.

The secondary navigation spec for CERF states that a few things must happen:

  1. When a user is visiting a site area (About Us, for example) the name of that site area must appear above the secondary nav. This gives the some good orientation about where he or she is in the larger context of the site.
  2. The child pages of that section (Our Staff, Our History, etc) must appear below the heading.
  3. The child page that the user is currently visiting must retain an active state (to further give notice of where the user is).
  4. Any grandchildren or great-grandchildren must be displayed when viewing their parent or grandparent (facilitating the display of third and fourth level pages).
  5. The grandchildren and great-grandchildren must display an active state upon display

Out of the box Wordpress provides some pretty nice menu features (using the get_pages function) but this spec is a little beyond what is available.

My hunt for a plugin left me passing up the popular Fold Page List plugin and moving onto Collapsing Page Menus by Cam Fraser. It was nearly what I was looking for.

I wrote to Cam and he agreed to make some quick modifications to the code. The world now has a very-reusable Wordpress menu manager that fits the bill for intuitive and accessible site navigation. Cam tells me he will be rolling the new features into the next version of his plugin. Look for it at his site. If you are in a rush contact me and I’ll send you what you need.

What’s next…

Coming up I’ll write about my solution for building the entire site information architecture using Pages while still allowing users to enter content using Posts (and making sure the right posts are aggregated on the correct pages). The solution is wonderful and really increases the flexibility of using Wordpress as a CMS. Once I clean the code up a bit I will make it available. For sure.