It is very possible, in fact I just implemented one myself for a company website. It’s very easy to do. Go back to your “menu’s” and make a new one and underneath the box where you’d usually add pages into the menu should be a box that says or lists your categories. 🙂 Then you just check the boxes beside the categories you want added and click add (the same way you’d add a page to a menu). Then go to your widgets page and make a new navigation widget using your newly created category driven menu! 🙂
I hope this helps. If not I can try and put some pictures with it!
Good Luck
Megan
Um – I think jimmypaderwants to display a single custom nav menu and then a category dropdown as well. In theory, that’s possible too if you add a widget-ready area to the right of your nav menu block and then use the Category widget from Appearance->Widgets.
yes esmi. that is what I had in mind.
but it appears a little more complicated than I had in mind.
I’d like the category drop down to be part of the custom menu.
This functionality does not appear to exist currently.
If I added a widget area to the right of the nav I’d have to style it as well to match the actual nav menu…
I was playing last night with hard coding the nav bar into the header.php and using something like the below to call the categories. I didn’t get through fixing the css but this seems to have a good chance of working.
what do you think?
<li id="products"><?php _e('Products:'); ?>
<ul>
<?php wp_list_cats(); ?>
</ul>
Does your current custom menu support dropdowns at all?
using modified 2010
appearance>menus
I do not see any dropdown functionality
Thinking on this some more…
If I added a widget area to the right of the nav I’d have to style it as well to match the actual nav menu
If you are comfortable tweaking CSS, that should be a relatively trivial job (for various definitions of the word “trivial”).
I was playing last night with hard coding the nav bar into the header.php
Why not use wp_dropdown_categories and let WP do the drudge work?
using modified 2010
I do hope that this is a child theme…
I do not see any dropdown functionality
The original Twenty Ten theme menu supports dropdowns. Try adding a sub-page to your current custom nav menu and you should see what I mean.
Greetings,
I have a similar issue. I have a client that I designed and built a WordPress site for, using a modified theme a few years ago. I think that may have been the TwentyTen theme. Today he emailed me asking if I could have his blog categories listed as a drop-down menu from the blog link on the main navbar. I know how to add pages as a drop down, by choosing a parent page, but I have no idea how to add a list of his blog categories as a drop-down on his navigation bar.
I thought that maybe custom menus would save me, but under Appearance/Menus, I am seeing the following notice:
The current theme does not natively support menus, but you can use the “Custom Menu” widget to add any menus you create here to the theme’s sidebar.
I looked at the wp_dropdown_categories, but I’m not sure this will do what I need, or if it will, how to implement it. Any advice on how I might go about adding categories as a drop down from the navbar (preferably under the blog menu item on the navbar).
Thanks in advance!
Deirdre
Deirdre, I ended up doing it in html and css
if you go to my site, http://awoodrailing.com you can see the html and css under:: div id=”nav”.
this was much easier to me than the wp_dropdown_categories call because I still had to style the call and its output.
Thanks Jimmy – I’ll take a look!
I ended up adding a function to enable custom menus for the theme, then created the new menu items and drop downs through Appearance/Menus. Finally, I renamed the elements in my CSS to match the classes and IDs for the new menu.
Here’s the code I added to function.php
add_action('init', 'register_custom_menu');
function register_custom_menu() {
register_nav_menu('custom_menu', __('Custom Menu'));
}
Hat tip to: Think Vitamin
