Wordpress Navigation Menu question

Hi, excuse me if this has been covered before, as I might have conducted the search with the wrong terminology.

The question I have is: is there any way to have more than one menu navigation bar on a wordpress site? Meaning, If I wanted a menu for basics like Home, Contact and about us, is it possible to place another menu navigation bar in the right column side that has specific pages? Sort of like using a joomla. Is there a plugin that will solve this?

Any help would be great...

 

You can loop through the page names and display pages like About, Contact etc say in the left side of the page and other pages say in the right side of the page using css. I hope you understand what i'm talking about.

Swamy

 

Thanks Swamy for responding, but do you mean basically having duplicate menu on the right side of the same thing? I'm trying to see if there can be a complete separate list or set of links.

Thanks

 

Well, I suppose you could place it in your header.php and also in your sidebar.php and just call both and have two menus that way. The truth is, it's not very good interface design to split the navigation up. It will mean your user will have to search in two places for the information he needs. I hope you have a good, logical reason for this.

 

the reason is, that if you have too many pages, it wouldn't fit right on the top/header nav, so it might make sense to break them up into the general menu (top/header) and more specific pages somewhere on the sidebars or column area.

I hope this makes sense. Like On top (Home, Contact, About, Services)

and in the side: specific page 1, specific page 2, specific page 3

This makes it more of a website than a blog, I know, but would be convenient to do small websites like this.

 

I think in a situation where you have a large navigation map, you need to break the links up into clear categories (which is good for the user anyway) and implement a drop-down system. Splitting the links up because you ran out of space is a sure sign that it's time to stop, back up and reorganize a bit.

 

OK, so drop down is a possibility? And then the links would be subpages? Is the dropdown menu a plugin? Or how would I do it?

thanks

 

drop-downs are always a possibility and sometimes are the best solution. there are plenty of CSS menu solutions all over the web. i recommend the "suckerfish" solution as it is cross-browser and fairly easy to implement.

you will have to edit your WP template manually and fit your new menu system into it.

 

I've used suckerfish too but i removed it as there was lots of customization that was needed. May be its easy now.

Swamy

 

I suppose what is considered "easy" and what isn't. Suckerfish is easy if you are comfortable with editing a CSS only design template. It is difficult if you are not.

 

It is easy, just need to read some wp tutorials.

 

Ok, thanks, I found some plugins, but to make it work, you need to play with the theme files to make it look decent.

Another option is if you can use categories as another option for pages. Not sure if I need another post for this, but if you could have the option of not having certain categories show up on the front page, then you would have in essence extra pages and a second menu to use. Is this possible, and I wonder if there is plugin out there.

Thanks

 

Yes of course, i meant you will have to go in and edit the theme. Sorry if that wasn't understood, I assumed that it was.

 

Were you referring to the suckerfish, or the categories question I later asked?

Thanks