Menu Management for WordPress

The soon to be released WordPress 3.0 comes with a new menu management, but your theme has to have this capability built in. But what if you’d rather not edit your theme files or simply don’t want to wait for WordPress 3.0? Luckily there are a few plugins out there that will enable you to have a very flexible menu – without the fancy interface though. These are plugins I have used extensively on many sites which required a custom menu.

Exclude Pages

Exclude Pages is a plugin that does exactly what the title suggest. It allows you to specify per page whether or not a page needs to be in the menu or not. This plugin adds a checkbox, ‘include this page in menus’ to your page edit screen. All you need to do is uncheck this to exclude pages from the page navigation so that users won’t see on your site. As simple as that. Do keep in mind that pages which are children of excluded pages also do not show up in menu listings.

Download Exclude pages here.

Page Links To

A wonderful little plugin called ‘Page Links To’ allows you to create a WordPress page or post link to a URL of your choosing, instead of its WordPress page or post URL. Especially when used with pages in a (dropdown) menu you can pretty much add any link you can find in your site to use as destination for the page. Page Links To will even allow you to redirect people who go to the old URL to the new one you’ve chosen. So with this plugin it’s very easy to add a link to a certain category or tag listing or even author pages.

Download Page Links To here.

Members

Now the third plugin is called Members and isn’t your typical Page or even Menu Management plugin, but it as plugin that lets you create a very custom made menu when there’s roles involved. For example, when you have a set of pages in your menu that are only meant to be visible for your clients then Members will allow you to create that. Rather than going into detail too much about what Members can do for you, because that is a lot, have a look at two screencasts that will explain to you better than I can do with words how you create a role depended menu.

And now for the actual magic:

More out there
I know there are a lot more plugins out there that let you manage your menu, but these three I have found to be working perfectly every time I have used them. If however you are curious about other plugins out there, I do encourage you to see what the plugin repository has to offer you on pages and menus.

This article first appearded on BloggingPro: Menu Management for WordPress