Creating menus - WordPress Tutorial

- Now that we have our initial pages, categories, and tags all created, now let's pull them all together and create the menu structure that will establish the organizational structure for our course. If you've been out to the front end of our site, you may have noticed that there is a menu that's been created for us automatically, and some themes will do this. As you create new pages, it'll automatically add them to the main menu. This is quite helpful for some situations, but for our class site, we really want to create our own custom menu. So let's go ahead and get rid of this menu and create our own custom one. So we'll go back into the admin section of our site, come down to Appearance, and click on Menus. Now, we'll create a main menu. And just click the Create Menu button. Now we'll start off by telling the theme where we want this menu to be located. We want it to be the top, primary menu. Next, we'll go ahead and add in a couple of the pages. We'll add in our About, our Syllabus, our Join Us, and I'll just add in the Lecture One materials. Later on, you can go back and add in the other units. So we'll start with these and click Add to Menu. Notice those come in as individual little blocks, and the menu is going to be built from the left side to the right. So we just need to make sure that the order of these pages is in the correct order. So we'll start with our unit, then we'll have the Join Us section, and then our syllabus, and the About. Next, we'll create a drop-down menu for all of our units materials to go into. And we'll do that by creating a custom link. Now, the custom link that we want to create normally would be for a URL that would take you out to another site, but instead of typing in a URL, we're just going to type in the pound sign. That'll create a link that won't go anywhere, so it'll effectively create that sub-menu for us. And we'll call this Units. And we'll say Add to Menu, and it shows up down here at the bottom, so we'll go ahead and drag that up to the top and then we'll drag Lecture Materials underneath of it. Now, if you want to see what this looks like on the front end, we can go ahead and click Save Menu, and we can go preview our site. But if you hold down the Command or Control key on your keyboard, and click on that link, it'll open that link in a new tab and now we can come over here and we can see there's our menu, with our dropdown, and our Join Us page, and our syllabus, and About. So we're looking pretty good. Let's come on back over here to the first tab, and now let's use that same trick to create a Unit One sub-menu underneath of the Units menu. So we'll come back down to Create a Custom Link, once again, we'll type in the pound sign, and now we'll call this Unit 01. And then we'll go ahead and add that to our menu. Now, once again, we'll drag that up into place, and now we'll move our sub-menu over into place. Let's go ahead and save that and double-check our work. We'll come back up here to the other tab and we'll simply refresh our browser. And now when we go to Units, you can see we've got another sub-menu, and our flyout for our lecture materials. Great. Let's go back and keep working on this. Next we want to create our Announcements section. Now, we did not create a category for announcements, and we didn't create any tags for it. What we did create was a category for each of the separate units. If we click on the View All, we should be able to see them all here, we'll scroll down just a little bit, there they are. We created a Unit 01 category, so I'll go ahead and add that category onto our menu, and I'm going to drag it up here. And we'll drag it right into place, and then we'll click the small drop-down menu on the side, and now we can change the navigational label. So we can change that, instead of saying Unit 01, we can say Announcements 01. This way, any post that an instructor adds to the Unit 01 category will automatically flow into this section of the menu, which will be called Announcements. Let's go ahead and save that, and double-check our work. We'll come back up here to the other tab, we'll refresh the browser, come back down to Units, Unit 01, and now we have Lecture Materials and Announcements 01. Next, let's go ahead and create the Streams drop-down menu. Once again, we'll come down here to Custom Links, we'll set the link to #, and the link text to Streams, click Add to Menu, now we'll go ahead and move that right up here just in front of Join Us. And now we'll add the other category tags for All Streams, Instructors, Open Participants, and Students. We'll go ahead and add that to the menu, and we'll drag those up into place. And then we'll go ahead and save the menu, and go check our work. And we'll refresh that, and now we have our drop-down for our units, our streams, the page for Join Us, our syllabus, and our About page. And things are looking pretty good. But if you come back here to Units and go down to Unit One, you may notice that we're missing one item, and that's the Discussions link that's created by using a tag. If we go back to our menu structure, you'll notice that there's not a tag section in here. In order to add tags into our menu structure, we need to come up here to the top and click on Screen Options, and then check the box for tags. We'll close the screen options, click the drop-down for tags, View All, and there it is. Unit 01. Now, this is what we're going to tell all of our students and our open participants to tag any post that they make that's related to Unit 01. We'll check that box, click Add to Menu, come down to the bottom, and drag that up into place. Now, we'll go ahead and click the drop-down menu and once again, we'll change the navigation label so instead of displaying as Unit 01, we'll display it as Discussions 01. We'll go ahead and save the menu, and check and see if that worked. We'll refresh the page, and now we go to Units, Unit 01, there we have our Lecture Materials, Announcements, and our Discussions. Now that we've built the first of the unit menus, go ahead and create the rest of them, and I'll do that off screen. And then in the next movie, we'll create a link out to our Learning Management System.