Use wp-menu for new nestable nav

[Joe]

I cannot find any (updated to the 1.8 changes since beta) resources, so hopefully someone can point me in the right direction. I also don’t understand the combination of these two whatsoever. I’ve just been plowing around for an hour, but I do not find the main idea of the nav builder system very transparent, or practical so far.

Hopefully, this can change with some pointers, an academy article, or perhaps there is a tutorial I missed and cannot find.

My idea now is that I need a separate WP-menu for each top-level menu, and for each dropdown, is that correct? I have no idea where to use these or select them.

All in all, it feels very chaotic and uncoordinated to me, but I am patient and willing to learn what I’ve missed. Hope there are some concrete resources.

Tnx

[digismith]

By way of reassurance, I felt exactly the same. I have now built my menus as I want them… but I still feel like I’m not sure if I built them like I should!

You don’t need a separate WP menu for every item. You can have normal links, dropdowns and megas all combined on one WP Nav menu.

But if you want to use WP menus, you need a Bricks element for each ‘special’ menu - so each mega, or their custom multi-level drop-down. So I can make template 1 (mega), template 2 (multilevel) - and then on my WPNAV select template 1 and 2 on the appropriate links. The other links might be plain WP links or wp drop-downs.

However, if you wish, you can nest menus in lots of flexible ways. How you build them seems to be based on how they should be maintained.

If your client wants to (or you want to) easily edit menus with the WP nav system, AND you want a mega-menu, then you will use template elements… one template element for each ‘mega-menu’.
So if you have ‘Mega-Projects’, and ‘Mega-Team’ - your wp menu may look like:

Home - About - Projects (linked to template) - Team (linked to template) - Contact

On the other hand, your client may not want to edit the nav at all - leaving you in complete control. In this case you can stick with the nav-nestable, drop-downs etc., all in Bricks. No need to use WP nav menus at all, much easier to layout, add icons etc. No need for separate templates as we need for WPNAV - as you can build it all in a single header template.

The problem for me is that their menu can now do everything, but it makes it quite complex. There’s also a lot of overlap. For example, you can set menu item color in the element settings, or the element style, or on a link element itself, or in the nav menu, or the nestable element - so there’s about 6 places to set text/link color and it’s not really clear what’s best practice.

I’m not sure that helps you much, hope it provides at least a little more understanding. If you have a particular menu setup you need, maybe describe it and we can offer pointers as to how it might be built.

[Joe]

Tnx for the extensive response.

Let’s start simple: I cannot find where to use a WP Menu, for simple top-level nav nestable menu. How?

[digismith]

Have you watched/read this?

Menu Builder

Your question doesn’t quite make sense to me.

OPTION ONE - just wordpress
For a standard WP menu. Just use the WP menu and add the WPNav element to your Bricks Header.
It is the normal menu, with drop-downs.

OPTION 2 - just Bricks
There is no ‘simple nav nestable menu’. The nav nestable is for when you want to do more than the WP menu.

So use NavNest/off canvas/ dropdown etc. when you want to build mega menus or multi-levels in Bricks. You can add all sorts of stuff, drop-down, multilevel, mega and just plain links… without using the WP menus at all.

OPTION 3 - mix
You can also use a standard WP nav, and add bricks templates to it. For example, I build a div with 2 columns, some links in column one, a post-query in column 2. Then I have a WP menu item open that div as a mega-menu… like this:

Project-Dropdown is the name of the template in which I made my div with columns. Now if I add the standard wpnav to my header - the PROJECTS link will show the mega-menu ‘project dropdown’.

I can also drop nav menus in my header like this:

Now my client can change this menu, but I control the rest of the links in the header.

[simplecreative]

You have to use query builder, like posts, and call dynamic data menus.