WP Menu Creator for Theme Developers

Posted on September 27, 2009
Filed Under General | 2 Comments

The number one problem WordPress themes suffer from. Poor Menu Management!

A true CMS solution would not require you to manipulate the structure of your content in order to alter the structure of your menu or other navigation elements. Yet, nearly all modern themes on the market today require that you alter the position or assignment of your content in order to change the structure of your navigation. WordPress codex outlines the methods and techniques on how to achieve this relatively easily so many theme developers usually employ the codex examples in order to give their theme the appearance of having rich menu management features. Having done this myself many dozens of times its difficult for some to conceive of a simpler way without writing custom functions specific to the theme as an alternative. For this reason and those I’ll cover below were motive in our creation of the fully open source free Menu Creator for WordPress.

After having built almost a hundred themes for WordPress clients and template resellers, the number one of the big challenges we had often faced was turning WordPress into a CMS to replace a system they were migrating (or escaping) from. A good CMS requires good menu management. Publishing a free WordPress menu management tool turned out to be more of a challenge in terms of informing people of its potential than we had expected. After all, the design and styling possibilities of the WP Menu Creator are nearly endless. Since we did not include any example menus with the distribution of the Menu Creator, it ended up hurting us in terms of perception that the Menu Creator was in some way incomplete. So, I’ll first explain our motive in keeping examples out of the distribution then move onto how to make menu management a part of your themes.

When we set out to build all of our free plugins, we knew in advance that in order to get WordPress to behave much like popular CMS solutions we needed to have a few important plugins. The need for menu management was obvious. Then came form generation, member grouping tools, news feeds, lead management, post planning, and in the case of Real Estate CMS sites, important feeds to things like Zillow or Dwellicious. What those CMS requirements gave us was a road map to the ideal WordPress CMS solution powered by for the most part with all of our current FREE GNU/GPL plugins. When I say “our” I’m referring to myself and The UltimateIDX whom of which pretty much finances all of these projects. When it came to our motive in keeping these tools very basic yet open for design possibilities we kept theme developers in mind since we are theme developers and knew what was needed, requested and expected in terms of ease of integration.

How to add Menu Management Support to your WordPress Themes

After having published so many plugins and addons it was planned from the start that we would not only extend the offer to theme developers of every classification but also take the time to assist with the inclusion of our plugins by providing code for the clean and easy implementation. Naturally we keep our tools and plugins as unbranded as can be realistically expected, but do require that the license information remain in the source code unchanged.

To revisit what I started above about the lack of any CSS in our plugins, it was important for us to make sure all theme developers could easily distribute the plugins and faithfully know that the rendered output would adopt their CSS. If the theme developer creates the navigation elements styled as expected, we knew they would want a reliable way of ensuring that our plugins would play along nicely. So, we included NO CSS menu examples within any of our plugins and opted instead to publish examples of code on The UltimateIDX, this blog and our others including some at Pro Real Estate Network.

This has been a pain, so after careful planning and organizing, we decided to setup a repository of sorts that would allow us to publish all code in one convenient place and beginning this weekend (September, 24th 2009) we are doing just that. If you are a theme developer in need of good menu management in your free or commercial efforts, don’t bother writing functions into your theme when you can easily distribute the WordPress Menu Creator. We will even give you the code to make it possible, FREE.

Comments

Leave a Comment

If you would like to make a comment, please fill out the form below.

Name (required)

Email (required)

Website

Comments

2 Comments so far
  1. Roger Decker September 27, 2009 3:34 am

    Jared are you saying that I can take your plugins and distribute them with my themes even if they are commercial?

    I know some themes include plugins but there isn’t any real code required to do this isn’t that correct?

  2. Jared Ritchey September 27, 2009 8:59 am

    Roger, yes, the idea behind this is to help theme developers provide exceptional menu management features within their themes. As far as code goes yes, you do need to include some code to make the menu creator render unless your menu zones are entirely widgetized.

    I have documentation on this which you are free to examine once published on The UltimateIDX.

    It is important to note that even our OpenRealty addons can be redistributed in accordance to the license.


TEMP CODE: GDHXCDX17249629