This plugin hasn’t been updated in over 2 years. It may no longer be maintained or supported and may have compatibility issues when used with more recent versions of WordPress.

Automatic Submenu for Categories & Pages

Description

Ever wanted to be able to automatically have category and pages children automatically added to your menus? I’m sure I did and was disappointed to not find something that dead simple that works and doesn’t mess up with the theme or other plugins.

Now bear with me on this one as it is my first WP plugin for like a decade and the first ever to be shared so i kept it quite basic.

How it works:

  • On each menu item that is either a category or a page you get an option to automatically append their children as a submenu
  • You get to decide how many children to show and how they’re gonna be ordered (Title or Date)
  • And that’s it, all you have to do is create content and never worry about your menu again.
  • As promised, it doesn’t mess with the theme or other plugins, it just injects the children found in the corresponding place of the nav menu array when that is triggered in the frontend

Code hacks

There is no settings page for the plugin but you can change a couple default behaviours from the code itself

Changing the default maximum children number when the field is empty

$item->automatic_max = 5; just change the number at line 220

Bring only direct children of Pages and not all ascendants

$children = get_pages( array( 'child_of' => $item->object_id, 'number' => $item->automatic_max, 'sort_column' => 'post_'.$ordering[0], 'sort_order' => strtoupper( $ordering[1] ) ) ); just change 'child_of' to 'parent' at line 226

Upcoming Features:

Due to lack of time i will implement the following features upon demand. Please post your requests in the forum.

  • Settings Page
  • Submenu items ordering
  • Support for custom post types and taxonomies

Credits:

  • I have used the menu walker created by zviryatko (https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/menu-image/trunk/menu-image.php)

Screenshots

  • How it looks like in the menu editor

Installation

Plain and simple

  1. Upload the plugin folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory, or install the plugin through the WordPress plugins screen directly.
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress
  3. Go to Appearance->Menu and config each menu item as you like

FAQ

Installation Instructions

Plain and simple

  1. Upload the plugin folder to the /wp-content/plugins/ directory, or install the plugin through the WordPress plugins screen directly.
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ screen in WordPress
  3. Go to Appearance->Menu and config each menu item as you like
Is there a limit on the submenus I can have the children automatically populated

No, you can have it enabled on whatever category or page manu you like, no matter how many or how deep they are in your menu structure

I saved my menu but I don’t see the children added in the menu editor

Yes that is correct, the children are shown only in the front-end of your website else you would have problems when saving your menu.

Can I change the ordering of the added children regarding manually added submenu items?

No, currently you cannot. All automatic children will be appended (added to the end) of the submenu. Leave a request on the forum if you would like this feature.

Can I use this plugin with custom post types and taxonomies?

No, currently you cannot. It works with pages and posts assigned to a category. Leave a request on the forum if you would like this feature.

Can i use this plugin along with another menu altering plugin (e.g. megamenu) ?

Yes, all this plugin does is inject items to the nav menu array for the front-end. It doesn’t affect the rendering of the menu. Nonetheless; I cannot guarantee the behaviour of third-party menu plugins which rely on custom post types other than nav_menu_item.

Reviews

February 19, 2019
Does not work. Instead of the menu I will write “Fatal error …” or “Warning …”. Do you know how to automatically generate a menu by category? It can also be a plugin. My website is divided into about 500 categories and subcategories, and then there are blog posts. The articles are over 1150. It’s annoying, and it’s impossible for every category in the WP administration and adding each post to the menus even manually. Personally, I do not even see the logic of why I should do something duplicitous when I’ve already created the structure of the site with categories. I also think that all website makers would save time and make it easier for everyone to use WP. I’m looking for a way to make this menu autotomically, leave the menu in the admine section and not to go.
May 21, 2018
Hi, I am looking for this similar kind of plugin. But my requirement is a little bit different, I am sure you can do this. I need this same functionality for woocommerce product categories. If it’s possible, then please let me know or you can update this plugin too. Thank you in advance
Read all 2 reviews

Contributors & Developers

“Automatic Submenu for Categories & Pages” is open source software. The following people have contributed to this plugin.

Contributors

Change log

1.0

  • Initial release