A lot of readers who use the Thesis WordPress Theme have asked me how to add a custom link to the nav menu.
Update: I highly recommend you use the newer WordPress Custom Menus instead of the Thesis menus. They are more flexible and work with any theme. Here’s a video showing how to set them up: WordPress Custom Navigation Menus (video)
It’s easy to create a new WordPress Page, and get it to show up in your navigation menu. The Thesis Options panel gives you a checkbox for each WordPress Page you create so you can easily add it to the menu.
But what if you want to add a link to something that is not a WordPress Page, or not on your site at all? For example the Forums tab in the navigation menu on my blog links to my Expand2Web forums based on phpBB.
Video: How To Add Custom Nav Menu Items Using Thesis and WordPress
This short video shows you how:
Step-by-Step Instructions
- Go in to WordPress Admin -> Links -> Link Categories. Add a Link Category called “Additional Menu Items.”
- Add a new link to the page you want to link to from the menu (in this case, your forum) and assign it the new “Additional Menu Items” category.
- In your Thesis Options, go to the Add More Links section in the middle column, and the Additional Menu Items dropdown. Select your “Additional Menu Items” category and now all links in that category will show up on your nav menu!
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{ 46 comments… read them below or add one }
Thanks for the tip, thesis is awesome…but there are still many unchartered areas for me.
Don,
Would I use the same method for linking the nav bar to other pages as described for Thesis? I need to set up nav bar buttons for the customer’s other locations. I assume the smallbiz site is not the same as Thesis. Also, it seems like the 3 buttons on the bottom are redundant with the buttons on the nav bar. Can the bottom buttons be removed or should I just re-label them. If so, how do I re-label?
Hi Mike,
Yes, you can use this method to link to any other site or URL from the Nav bar in Thesis.
For the SmallBiz WP theme, The “Feature Boxes” at the bottom of the page can be set to point to any WP Page on your site. In many cases, you’ll have pages that are not showing in the Nav menu that you want to feature in a different way. This allows you to do that.
If you want to eliminate them altogether, I can send you a quick edit to one of the theme files to just remove the feature boxes.
Hi, my WP-Thesis navigation bar displays selected pages left to right strictly in alphabetical orders. How do I change it (list selected pages in the navigation bar in the order I want)?
Thanks!
Beat
@Beat Schindler – you can edit the “Order” attribute of each page (lowest numbers to the left) on your nav menu to re-order them, or if you have Thesis 1.5 you can Drag and Drop them in the Thesis Options panel!
This was a helpful post, thank you. I know it’s old but I was wondering if there was a way to modify the link order for the “Additional Menu Items” links? I know you can adjust the links for the Pages you create however I don’t see a way to adjust the order of your custom links that you add to the nav bar.
Hi Brian,
I recommend using the WordPress Custom Menus now instead of the Thesis menu. They are way more customizable. Here’s a video that shows you how to set them up: WordPress Custom Navigation Menus (Video)
Excellent! Thanks!
Hi Don,
When I use the WP menus, the Custom Links options are missing. I had to use the Thesis menu options but like Brian’s request, I was unable to customize the Additional links. Is it normal for the custom links box to disappear with the Thesis theme?
Great article! Thank you
One other question – if I add three links can I set the order they appear in? If so how? Default seems to be alphabetical (see client blog at: http://www.brightposting.com).
@Stephen Fells – thanks!
Since you are using Thesis 1.5.1 you can go into Thesis “Design Options” and go to “Navigation Menu” and drag and drop your pages into the order you want.
This does not work for additional links added to the nav menu though. I don’t know of a way to order those.
I did exactly what u say, when you click but the link its open a new page. I want to embed that page into word press
Thanks
Hi,
I tried to add sub nav menu but i have not searched any help.
Can i add sub nav menu in the thesis theme.
Thanks
Hameed
@Hameed – here are a couple of tutorials on how to do sub-menus in Thesis:
http://www.kristarella.com/2009/03/thesis-nav-menus/
http://thesisthemetools.com/two-new-menu-system-tutorials-for-you/
I created the category “additional Menu items” and then created a new link and chose my category above. When I go back to look at my links, my link shows that it’s under blogroll. I thought I made a mistake so I edit it and save it and it still defaults to blogroll.
Any reason why?
My link also doesn’t show up on my site as well as a tab/page… Not sure why.
thx
Dan
@Dan – somehow the Blogroll category is still associated with that link. When you Edit the link, which category boxes are checked? Only the “Additional Menu Items” category should be checked, no others.
Then you’ll need to complete steps 2 and 3 detailed in my post above to get the link to show up in your nav menu.
If I’m not answering your question just let me know…
When I Edit the Link, Blog Category is checked. I go ahead and uncheck it and check the Additional Menu Items. I save it and come back to edit the link and the Blogroll is still checked but not the Additional Menu Items.
Frustrating. Not sure it’s doing that…
Dan
Sorry, missed a word in my last sentence.
“Not sure why it’s doing that…”
thx for your input.
Dan
Hey Don,
Just wanted to let you know I got my problem solved. Had to pay a tech $50 but he figured it out. He simply re-installed Thesis and everything is working just fine now.
Thanks for your help.
Dan
Great tutorial, worked on both my sites! Thank you!
Great tutorial. One question–how would I go about having this navigation in a drop-down menu?
I need to have the main nav menu say “store” and then have a sub menu with direct links to non WP pages. Is this possible?
thanks!
Hi Dave,
Good question. You can do sub-menus now in Thesis 1.6, but I don’t believe you can have the sub menu items point to pages outside of the current site.
-Don
Bummer. I’ve been looking all over to try and do this…
Hi I hope its not too late BUT, what I do is i create a subpage on that and use the 301 URL redirect,
so in your case you would create a subpage on store and on that subpage, find for 301 URl redirect and insert the URL there
Hope this helps
Hi!
I sent a previous comment and now I feel really silly. Once I took the time to watch your video you provided the exact steps for what I need. Thanks so much and please do not post my previous comment.
No worries Tiffany – deleted. Thanks for stopping by and I’m glad the video helped you!
-Don
I’m having the same problem that @Stephen Fells had with the links order being impossible to change. At this point I’m at my wits end and would much rather just nuke the thesis menu alltogether and replace it with a bunch of HTML with the links I want. It seems that’s impossible unless you know PHP, so I’m up the creek. It’s astonishing to me that there’s no manual override where I can just great a totally manual set of links (internal or external) for the menu! Any plugin writers out there?
Great post but it doesn’t work if you want to set Thesis up to have categories as separate pages. That just creates an alphabetical order in the nav menu. You have to use a custom function for it to be customizeable (is that a word).
I posted a function (and explanation of how it works) here:
http://www.invisibleinkwebdesigns.com/weblog/php/customising-your-category-link-order-in-wordpress/
Hope that helps those above who are still having problems…
Hi!
Sorry if this is off topic – I’d like to stop one of the parent level nav items from being linked to a page … so that only it’s sub-menus link to their respective pages.
Any suggestions would be really appreciated – if this is too off topic, please let me know
Cheers
Jonno
@Nick – yes that is a great plugin idea. You can order pages by changing the page order number when editing the page, but I don’t know of a way to add the custom “off page” links.
@Luke – thanks for sharing this!
@Jonno – That’s a great question; I’ve heard this a lot. This would be a great thing for any WordPress theme to have. WordPress is coming up with a new navigation menu architecture in WordPress 3.0 so we’ll see if they address this…
thank u for your ebook
Hi Don Great Site , I like the fact there is a video in almost every tutorial.
I was searching on google webmaster tools and found your site on google. Anyways
Just a suggestion instead of using links why not create Pages and then use the
301 Redirect for this Page’s URL option and insert the destination URL in the post editing section – (Just below the Thesis meta keywords field)
That way you can arrange your links since pages can be organized and reordered but not links.
I am not so sure entirely on the SEO aspects of redirects but I dont think it will affect much.
Awesome, this is the fix I’ve been looking for. 301′s shouldn’t effect SEO very much at all. Indexing can take a while to update and migrate to the new url, but they will crawl it like normal. As I understand it in most cases this shouldn’t greatly affect traffic.
Thanks Brandon!
-Brendan
Thank you for the great tutorial! I was able to implement this on my arcade blog on WP using Thesis Theme to link to the main site. Kudos!
it works for me thanks
How do I add a search box below the nav menu similar to yours?
Great, thanks for this useful tutorial. Actually i was searching for adding a custom NAV Bar to my thesis theme.
thanks, just what I needed to add a link to our new Helpdesk Ticketing system
Phil
I just watched your video on how to create a link category to link to a URL outside of Wordpress. Thanks so much. I have 1 question. I made all the adjustment in my thesis theme control panel but can’t seem to figure out how to move the new link (outside wordpress url) on the Nav bar to the first position. I cant drag it on my thesis pages option because it doesn’t show up there because it is a separate link. Thank you in advance. BTW Great website you have
@Stelli, you can’t actually rearrange the tabs you used for external links. If you use the new menu system that appeared starting with WordPress 3.0, then you can. This video shows you how: WordPress 3.0 Custom Navigation Menus
Thanks for the tutorial, it worked a treat. However the external link is now also showing up in my sidebar as a category heading. I don’t require it in this position but can’t work out how to keep it in the nav bar but not to show in the sidebar. Any ideas?
Thanks
Thanks for this. But I have old pages which appear in the sidebar and only Home at the top. I’m just not sure how to move few of them to the top next to the Home button….
Cheers
Alex
Did it…I’ve followed your video on menus…
Cheers (really cool site btw)
Alex
Thank you very much for your tips, I was wondering how to customize thesis menu and I found it on your blog.
Thanks
hello,
i add the link but i want other color for tab link, how i can do this?
thank you
Hey there. I use Thesis 1.8 with WP 3.2.1., you can switch between the Thesis Nav menu and the default WordPress Nav.
On your Thesis Options page, look under
Navigation Menu>Select Menu Type and select the Option you want:
WordPress nav menu OR Thesis nav menu
Hope that helps!
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