Automatic Submenu for Categories & Pages

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)