The thesis menu is relatively easy to customize. One issue that I ran into with it, however, is listing POSTS in the drop down proves itself relatively difficult by default. In fact, my impression so far is that by default you’d have to manually convert pre-existing posts into pages to get them in the drop down causing you to lose all your comments! Forget that.
I — thankfully! — ran across a really useful post from beingruth.com that makes creating a custom menu relatively simple, so long as you don’t mind editing the most basic of html code, and installing a wordpress plugin called thesis openhook (which you should do anyway, if you’re a thesis theme user).
Thesis Openhook, which I mentioned briefly in my list of the best wordpress plugins, adds a nifty menu to your WordPress administration panel that allows you to drop code into thesis hooks very rapidly — allowing you to completely avoid having to edit any of the themes files manually.
Basically, what you’ll need to do is disable the default menu generated by thesis, and then plug in a replacement using the thesis_hook_before_header hook. All of this can be done in thesis openhook.
Here’s a sample menu code you can modify to suit your tastes (thanks Ruth!)
<ul class="menu"> <li class="tab"><a href="">Item 1</a></li> <li class="tab"><a href="">Item 2</a> <ul> <li><a href="">Item 2, Child 1</a></li> <li><a href="">Item 2, Child 2</a></li> </ul> </li> <li class="tab"><a href="">Item 3</a> <ul> <li><a href="">Item 3, Child 1</a></li> <li><a href="">Item 3, Child 2</a></li> </ul> </li> <li class="tab"><a href="">Item 4</a></li> </ul>
Meanwhile, Inside Thesis Openhook…
If you were to do something silly and not actually edit the sample code you’d end up with something that looked rather much like…
Clearly manually inserting your menu like this using thesis’ hooks means that you can put any links in your menu that you darned well please without dilly dallying with page parent-child relationships, or having to convert your posts into pages (what a pain!). If you’re interested in exploring customizing other aspects of Thesis you’ll probably find the Thesis Hook Map *very useful, so make sure to check that out.
