First, find the location where you want to display the link. A good place to put it is either just before, or just after the main content of the page.

I look for the following code in the /wp-content/YourThemeName/page.php (or single.php) file:

<?php the_content(); ?>

and place the following code just after it:

<?php edit_post_link('[edit this page]', '<p>', '</p>'); ?>

That displays [edit this page] in it’s own paragraph so it shouldn’t mess up your page formatting on you! Hope this helps.

First, we need to enable support within the theme. To do that, open the /wp-content/themes/YourThemeName/functions.php file and add this line of code to the bottom (before the closing “?>”):

add_theme_support( 'menus' );

Now the theme knows it can support custom menus. Next we need to tell the theme where it can put them – we do this by placing calls to the wp_nav_menu() function where we want the menus to appear.

Usual locations for menus are in the header near the top of the page, in a sidebar, and in the page footer. What I normally do for smaller sites is put a limited menu in the banner, which only contains the main pages of the site and doesn’t change when new pages are added. Then for the sidebar I add a full list of all pages, which grows as pages are added. Depending on the site, sometimes you want to show child pages, on others parent pages only.

Let’s get to the code already! Here’s a typical menu. Note the ‘menu’ => ‘menu-sidebar’ code is what identifies the menu by name within the WordPress 3 menu system, and the ‘container_class’ => ‘menu-sidebar’ bit is what creates the class=”menu-sidebar” bit so you can style each menu invidually within CSS.


<!--sidebar.php-->
<h2>Site Navigation</h2>
<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'container_class' => 'menu-sidebar', 'menu' => 'menu-sidebar') ); ?>


And here’s a header menu – I’ve left in the h1 header for context, but the  wp_nav_menu() is the relevant bit for us.


<div id="header">
<h1><a href="<?php echo get_settings('home'); ?>/"><?php bloginfo('name'); ?></a></h1>
<h2><?php bloginfo('description'); ?></h2>
</div>

<div id="menudiv">
<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'container_class' => 'menu-header', 'menu' => 'menu-header' ) ); ?>
</div>


That’s it – adding custom menu support to your WordPress theme is pretty easy, eh? Your suggestions or questions are very welcome in the comments section below.

I’ll write up a post sometime detailing how the whole thing works, I think it’s pretty cool.

I was recently asked about using custom fields in WordPress and I thought it was worthy of a quick blog post. I’ve seen custom fields used for many different things from review ratings (e.g “3/5 stars“) to mood messages (“Today I feel like listening to  loud metal and shouting at my housemates“), etc. For this example, let’s use a very simple real case we recently dealt with.

We wanted to have an image appear at the top of the WordPress Page or Post, under the headline but above the text. We wanted the image to be shown whenever we supplied one. Here’s how we implemented it.

First off, we want to put it after the header, but before the title. We did a “View Source” on one of the pages and saw code that looked like this for the headline and content:

<div class="content">
<h2 class="title">Case Studies</h2>
<p>What follows are real life examples of recent work we carried our. We have chosen 3 examples representing vastly different business verticals and company age. If you would like to ask us more about these please contact us.</p>
<p><a class="post-edit-link" href="http://www.oursite.tld/wp-admin/post.php?post=476&amp;action=edit" title="Edit Page">Edit this entry.</a></p>
</div>

So we now roughly what the code that we want to find in the theme looks like. We found it in the page.php file (www.oursite.tld/wp-content/themes/our-theme-name/page.php). Here’s what it looked like:

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<?php the_content('<p>Read the rest of this page &raquo;</p>'); ?>
<?php wp_link_pages(array('before' => '<p><strong>Pages:</strong> ', 'after' => '</p>', 'next_or_number' => 'number')); ?>
<?php endwhile; endif; ?>
<?php edit_post_link('Edit this entry.', '<p>', '</p>'); ?>

Now we’re getting places – we want to add our custom image after the <h2>”the_title()”</h2> header, and before the call to “the_content()”. Let’s build the code we want to add.

First of all, we’ve decided to call our custom field “‘custom-post-image” to reflect its usage. We need to check the custom fields array to find out if that exists using the get_post_meta() function like so:

$themeta = get_post_meta($post->ID, $customfieldkey, TRUE);

Now all we want to do is check if it’s empty (or rather, if it’s not):

if($themeta != '') {}

And finally, if it’s not empty, build the <img> tag based on the custom field contents:

echo '<img class= "custom-post-image" src="';
echo $themeta;
echo'" />  ';

Here’s the complete code – rather simple really!

<?php if (have_posts()) : while (have_posts()) : the_post(); ?>
<h2><?php the_title(); ?></h2>
<?php
/*     check if custom-post-image custom field exists,
if it does, display an image, if not, do nothing */
$customfieldkey = 'custom-post-image';
$themeta = get_post_meta($post->ID, $customfieldkey, TRUE);
if($themeta != '') {
echo '<img class= "custom-post-image" src="';
echo $themeta;
echo'" />  ';
}
?>
<?php the_content('<p>Read the rest of this page &raquo;</p>'); ?>

That’s the code all done! Now all we need to do is add the custom field, and populate it. That’s very easy to do also. From under the edit box in your Write Page scroll down to the Custom Fields box. Click on “Enter new” (highlighted below):

Now add your custom field using the same name that you used in your code – above we used “custom-post-image”. Select it from the drop-down, then fill in a value for the image location – e.g. “/images/our-example-image.png”:

You’re done:

Enjoy playing with WordPress custom fields!

Stay tuned.

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Fusce id mi risus. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Praesent molestie, nibh eu vulputate mattis, libero eros bibendum velit, et congue massa quam id odio. Donec eros mi, auctor nec porta non, venenatis sodales elit. Aliquam tellus nisl, sagittis vel bibendum in, mattis in arcu. Pellentesque cursus, enim et laoreet pharetra, turpis quam vulputate diam, a ornare dolor lacus vitae nulla. In hac habitasse platea dictumst. Aenean in tellus ipsum, in vulputate tortor. Aliquam condimentum libero vel orci aliquet lobortis. Maecenas commodo diam at ipsum pellentesque dignissim convallis lacus faucibus. Suspendisse hendrerit placerat dolor at iaculis. Aenean vitae odio odio. Phasellus viverra, magna vitae porta pellentesque, sapien purus tristique enim, quis aliquam nisl nisl a neque. Mauris laoreet orci at erat pretium sodales. Proin mi diam, tempus et dictum et, ultrices a lorem. Nullam pharetra, nunc nec eleifend suscipit, tellus urna pulvinar dolor, commodo placerat nibh tellus eu magna. Praesent dapibus pretium ullamcorper. Duis nec bibendum purus. Cum sociis natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus. Maecenas et metus a magna ullamcorper mollis et congue tortor.

Aenean sed ipsum tortor. Mauris interdum vestibulum neque dictum scelerisque. In volutpat, enim vel pharetra vestibulum, metus eros porttitor felis, quis euismod nisl erat vel lorem. Aliquam nec sapien sodales orci dapibus feugiat eget at magna. Mauris id libero turpis, sed facilisis odio. Cras gravida purus in mauris placerat interdum. Fusce quis rhoncus ligula. Integer lacinia sagittis quam varius posuere. Nam a sapien sed quam sodales posuere. Cras egestas blandit enim, et ultricies ipsum aliquet in.

Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Maecenas auctor est at dolor ornare quis congue libero mollis. Phasellus posuere dictum augue, sed tempor nisi elementum sit amet. Fusce auctor urna sed odio iaculis ac malesuada mi ultricies. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique senectus et netus et malesuada fames ac turpis egestas. Ut commodo justo posuere diam eleifend scelerisque. Fusce dictum consequat consequat. Fusce nisl nisl, aliquet nec vestibulum sit amet, convallis vel risus. Nulla ultricies luctus nisi quis pretium. Cras vel dolor orci, id feugiat neque. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla sed velit nisl. Vivamus magna neque, blandit nec ultricies pretium, ultricies quis nunc. Quisque sit amet diam urna. Sed tempor pharetra mauris id imperdiet. Cras gravida, eros non sagittis ullamcorper, nibh neque lobortis mauris, sit amet lacinia magna tellus sit amet purus.

Proin bibendum, dolor vel vestibulum sagittis, purus magna laoreet sem, eu mollis est nisl sed nunc. Nunc eu erat vitae sapien laoreet semper. Duis at tortor odio. Donec eleifend lobortis nisi, vitae molestie tortor feugiat et. Nullam risus odio, ornare nec interdum ac, luctus eget tellus. Cras mattis est et lorem elementum quis pulvinar lacus consectetur. Vivamus tempor pretium orci id consectetur. Vivamus dictum interdum ante, a eleifend tellus eleifend ut. Suspendisse est mauris, mollis ac tempus quis, malesuada in libero. Curabitur posuere lacus eu nisl sagittis fermentum quis vitae justo. Aenean ultrices elementum odio, sed porta mauris placerat hendrerit. Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Proin et mi tortor, id blandit massa. Donec posuere posuere sem, sit amet rutrum ipsum pulvinar ut. Nulla hendrerit, nulla vitae ullamcorper iaculis, nibh turpis malesuada turpis, quis dictum sapien velit in metus. Aenean eu nisi non dui sodales vehicula. Aliquam erat volutpat. Vestibulum ante ipsum primis in faucibus orci luctus et ultrices posuere cubilia Curae; Mauris vehicula dui orci.