Advanced Sidebar Menu

WordPress Plugin

So What exactly is the Advanced Sidebar Menu?

As the web grows so does the size of website’s sitemaps. As these grow to be 30, 100, 0r even 500 pages, the traditional single navigation becomes too cluttered. We try to make it a little cleaner by adding an additional navigation in the sidebar, but we can’t display every page the site has in the sidebar. We could create custom menus for each page or section and register different widget areas but this ends up being way too much work and impossible to maintain.

This is where this handy little plugin comes in:

The advanced sidebar menu creates normal widgets that can be added into a widget area like any other. Once on the page it will display only the pages that are parents of the page you are currently on or children of the top level parent of the page you are currently on. I know this sound like a mouthful.

Here is an example:

Let’s say you have a page called “About”, this will be our parent page. We have 3 other pages “Contact”, “Services”, and “Hours” . Each of these will be set to have “About” as the parent page. We add another level of pages “Office”, and “Field” and we assign “Contact” as the parent page for these two.

We now have structure that looks like this.

If you put the widget in a widget area that shows up on these pages it will work in the following ways:

If you are on page (i) this will display pages (i), (1), (2), (3).
If you are on page (1) or (3) this will display pages (1), (2), (3).
If you are on pages (2), (a), or (b) this will display pages (1), (2), (a), (b), (3).

This process will continue on any pages the widget is on. Just like that, it makes your huge sitemap manageable and easy for your viewers to navigate.

This works the same way for categories. By selecting the Advanced Sidebar Categories Menu widget you can have the same parent and child generated menus for your categories. Any categories the widget is on will automatically generate the menu. You may optionally select to have the categories show up on your single posts as well.

Features

Page and Category widgets
Option to display or not display the highest level parent page or category
Option to display the menu when there is only the highest level parent
Ability to order pages by (date, title, page order)
Exclude pages or categories by entering a comma separated list of ids
Option to always display child pages or categories
Option to select the levels of pages or categories to display when always display child is used
Option to display or not display categories on single posts
Ability to display each single post's category in a new widget or in same list

For more features Go PRO

Optionally display only the current page's parents, grandparents, and children
Ability to customize each page link’s text
Click and drag styling for page, category, and navigation menu widgets
Styling options for links including color, background color, size, and font weight
Styling options for different levels of links
Styling options for the current page or category
Styling options for the parent of the current page or category
Block styling options including borders and border colors
Bullet style selection from 7 styles or select none to have no bullets
Accordion menu support for pages, categories, and navigation menus
Accordion icon style and color selection
Accordion option to keep all sections closed until clicked
Accordion option to include highest level parent in accordion
Ability to exclude a page from all menus using a simple checkbox
Link ordering for the category widget
Number of levels of pages to show when always display child pages is not checked
Ability to select and display custom post types
Ability to select and display custom taxonomies
Optionally display child page siblings when on a child page. With our without grandchildren available.
Ability to display the widgets everywhere the sidebar displays
Ability to select the parent page/category when using the display widget everywhere option
Ability to display assigned posts or custom post types under categories or taxonomies
Ability to select which levels of categories assigned posts should display under. * NEW *
Ability to limit the number of posts or custom post types to display under categories
Support for custom navigation menus from Appearance -> Menus
Ability to display the current Navigation Menu's items parents and children only
Optionally display the top level Navigation Menu's items when there are no child items or not viewing a menu item
Priority Support with access to members only support area.