OnPoint Plugins

Advanced Sidebar Menu

WordPress plugin which uses the parent/child relationship of your pages or categories to generate menus based on the current section of your site.

Advanced Sidebar Menu

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 reasonably display every page the site has. 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 widgets and blocks which may be added to content, template or widget areas. When viewing the page, the menu displays only the pages that are related to the page you are currently viewing.

Related pages are determined using the parent/child relationship built into WordPress.

Here is an example:

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

The widget will display in the sidebar of all included pages with the following menu structure:

  1. When you are viewing page (i) the menu will display pages (i), (1), (2), (3).
  2. When you are viewing page (1) or (3) the menu will display pages (1), (2), (3).
  3. When you are viewing pages (2), (a), or (b) the menu display pages (1), (2), (a), (b), (3).

This process will continue on any pages the widget is displayed 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 block or widget you may display a menu of the related categories. The menu will automatically display on all categories containing the block or widget. You may optionally select to have the categories show up on your single posts as well.

Translations

This plugin includes the following languages:

  • English (en_US)
  • French (fr_FR)
  • German (de_DE)
  • Spanish (es_ES)

Features

  • Page and Category menu Gutenberg blocks.
  • Page and Category menu 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, or 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 the same list.

For more features Go PRO

  • Navigation menu widget.
  • Navigation menu Gutenberg block.
  • Ability to customize each category or page link title with a simple text field.
  • Click-and-drag styling for page, category, and navigation menus.
  • Styling options for links including color, background color, size, hover, 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.
  • Blocked styling options including borders, border width, and border colors.
  • Option to choose from 7 bullet styles or 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.
  • Accordion option to use links for open/close.
  • Ability to exclude a page from all menus using a simple checkbox.
  • Ability to exclude category from all menus using a simple checkbox.
  • Link ordering for category menus.
  • 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.
  • Ability to display category post counts.
  • Exclude pages or categories using intuitive search and select.   New
  • Option to display only the current page's parents, grandparents, and children.
  • Option to display child page siblings when on a child page (with or without grandchildren available).
  • Ability to display the menu on every page (including homepage if applicable).
  • Ability to select the highest level parent page/category.
  • Ability to select which levels of categories assigned posts will display under.
  • Ability to display assigned posts or custom post types under categories or taxonomies.
  • 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 item's parents and children only.
  • Option to display the top-level navigation menu items when there are no child items or not viewing a menu item.
  • Priority support with access to members only support area.