Plugin Overview

When custom menus were added in WordPress 3.1, theme developers were quick to embrace them for navigation lists. Custom menus were a big step forward for WordPress as a CMS; the menu management screen made it easy for end users to build their own navigation menus, and the Theme Features API made it possible for developers to register and display menus wherever they were called for by the design.

While it was a big improvement, it also introduced a disjointed relationship between the hierarchical order set when creating custom menus and the order set while editing individual pages. The overlap in functionality can be confusing to end users, especially for less blog-centric sites with large and complex page hierarchies.

The navigation plugin brings parity between the built-in page ordering and the site structure presented in navigation lists.

It does this in a couple of ways:

• By replacing the built-in "Page Parent" and "Menu Order" interface for setting page order
• By adding an "Edit Order" screen that gives users a holistic view of their sites page hierarchy
• By adding a "Content Navigation" widget to display dynamic sidebar navigation lists from built-in page structure
• By giving theme developers the ability to support and display a primary navigation list populated by the natural site structure