Combining custom menus and widgets

- Sometimes the true power of a feature only becomes apparent when you combine it with another feature, and that is definitely the case with menus and widgets. You see, one of the widgets available to you is called custom menu, and it allows you to add a custom menu to your widgetized area. This opens up almost unlimited options where linking is concerned. To see why this is so valuable, let's just briefly jump to the front end of the site. You'll remember that previously I created two custom menus, and then I set those custom menus up to display in the menu locations of my current theme.

That would be the primary menu here, and then the social media menu. You'll also remember I added some widgets, and those included things like recent posts, some recent comments and pages and so on. The problem is, in many cases you will want to create some sort of custom menu. That could be a custom menu pointing to specific posts within your site, or specific pages. It could be a custom menu pointing elsewhere on the web to your favorite sites, or it could be something like a list of your favorite images and attachment pages, or really anything you can think of.

The magic of the web is that you can link anywhere you want, and it would be great if we could create custom menus to place anywhere we wanted on the site, make them point anywhere we want. And that's exactly what we can do with this custom menu widget. So let's create a custom menu that points to some of my favorite sites on the web and place it in a widgetized area. First, I need to go to the customizer and create my custom menu. So I'll click menus, add a new menu, my favorite links, click create menu, and then I'll add some items.

And here I'm going to create a list of custom links, so I'll say lynda.com/mor10's courses on lynda.com. And then I'll say alistofpart.com, and my own website, and once I'm done creating this menu, I can jump back to the main customizer. Now all I have to do is add the widget, so I'll go to widgets and the correct widget area, then I'll click add a widget, find custom menu, and I'm going to drag this all the way up to the top right under the search bar here.

Then I can give my new custom widget a title, so I'll call it my favorite links. And then use this selector to select the menu in question. Now you can see my new custom menu appear in my sidebar as a list of links, and because this is a custom menu, I can now go back to my custom menu and reorganize the items, or add in new items or change where they link to, or add other information, and do pretty much whatever I want. So this is a really powerful tool that you can use to create custom navigation all over your site.

I often use this to create custom navigation at the footer of my sites to point to specific pieces of content within my site, maybe all my legal pages, or all my about pages, or something like that. Or I may use it to create custom links like you see here to elsewhere on the web. What I like about this is because this is a custom menu, always go back to the custom menu, and reorganize the content or change the structure of the content, you can see if I indent things they get indented, and really make the menu work exactly the way I want.

And anytime I want to add new content, simply click add item, and I can add any item that I would add to a regular menu, including any post, any page, any category index, any tag index, any post format, or any custom link of my choosing. Really powerful, really easy to use, and now you know how to do it too.