My church site is now on line using Wordpress as a CMS. Although we are still making improvements, there has been enough progress to begin to share some of what I have learned.

In order to use Wordpress as a CMS, there are several needs that have to be met. Some of the ones that come to mind are:

• navigation
• custom features
• user management
• ease of updating

In this post I want to share what I have learned about navigation. To make the site user-friendly it is important to put navigation controls where users expect to find them, which is normally either a horizontal menu bar at the top or a menu in the left side bar. I opted to use both. (You can try them out at the church site.)

To make the horizontal nav menu I have seen WP themes that hand code the links, but I wanted to have top level pages automatically appear in the menu. Here is the code I use:

Then you need to define the “topnav” list style to use an in-line list. Here is what I have in my style sheet:

There are probably a few places that this could be cleaned up, but anyway it works!

Next time I will write about the sidebar menu. . .