web2feel.com – Free wordpress themes – Tutorials – Tips and tricks

Introduction of custom navigation menu system is a highlight of the WordPress 3 release. This gives the theme users so much freedom to configure the navigation menu without touching a single piece of code. Now it will be possible to arrange menu items and configure the hierarchy of the menu items on a fly. Web2feel themes created prior to the WordPress 3 release will not have this feature enabled on them. So you wont be able to configure the menu items on those themes through the custom menu interface. So I decided to make a screencast explaining how one can configure the old themes to harness this new menu feature.

The screencast is of 10 mins divided into 2 parts of 5 mins each due to the time limit of the screenr.  To enable the menu feature first you need to edit the function.php file of your theme. Just open the file on any text editor and add the following code in it.

 
register_nav_menus(
	array(
	'primary'=>__('Primary Menu'),
	)
);

Now we have enabled the custom menu feature and declared a menu location called primary .Next step is to place the navigation menu code where you want the menu to appear. In most cases it is on the header.php file.  So look for the existing  page menu or category menu encased in the ul tags.

 
		<ul>
			<li class="page_item <?php if ( is_home() ) { ?>current_page_item<?php } ?>"><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/" title="Home">Home</a></li>
			<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=&sort_column=menu_order');?>
		</ul>

delete it and paste the following code in its place.

 
<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'primary','fallback_cb'=> '' ) ); ?>

Now you have enabled the menu feature and you will be able to configure the menu items from the menu admin panel.

Watch the screencasts

Part -1

Part-2

I hope it was useful to you all.. Thank you

Reference:

WordPress Codex

Justin Tadlock ( Detailed explanation of the feature, developers are suggested to read this )