How to Use WordPress Categories and Navigation Menu Together

I came across an unusual question this week: The questioner wanted to know how to assign blog posts to specific pages that would be displaid in the blog menu.

Their blog is a cookery blog and they wanted to be able to write a post that would be (for example) an Italian recipe, and allow searchers to see and navigate to it through a menu item entitled ‘Italian Recipes’.

Here’s how you would do that:

The WordPress navigation menu enables you to include Categories in the navigation bar. Categories are also hierarchical, so you can have parent and child categories.

You can also include ‘Custom Links’, so it would be easy to create this set up.

So create a category called ‘Recipes’ and then make that the parent category for a series of sub-categories, one for each type of recipe: e.g. – Italian Recipes, French Recipes, etc.

Then you can create categories in your navigation menu by adding ‘Category’ items.

To create a child category in the navigation menu add more ‘Category’ items under the initial one, but drag them slightly to the right. This will cause them to drop down as sub-menu items in the navigation bar.

Then I’d assign each recipe post to the relevant sub-category – but only that sub-category, i.e. One sub-category per post.

And finally I would add Custom menu items for each recipe and add them under the relevant sub-menu item.

So here’s what your navigation menu would look like on the Appearance > Menus screen:

And here’s how it would appear on the front of the site:

Cheers,

Martin Malden
Owner – WealthyDragon