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:

[code lang="html"]

< ?php wp_list_pages('sort_column=menu_order&title_li= &depth=1'); ?>

[/code]

Then you need to define the “topnav” list style to use an in-line list. Here is what I have in my style sheet:
[code lang="css"]
#topnav
{
list-style: none;
font-size:1.0em;
margin: 0 0 0 178px;
padding: 3px 0px 3px 0;
text-align: left;
font-family: Verdana, Arial, Sans-Serif;
font-weight: bold;
}

#topnav ul
{
margin: 0;
padding: 0;
color: #BBC4A3;
}

#topnav ul li {
display: inline;
margin: 0;
}

#topnav li a:link, #topnav li a:visited
{
text-decoration:none;
color: #BBC4A3;
margin: 0;
border-color: #BBC4A3;
border-left: thin solid;
padding: 0 10px 0 10px;
}

#topnav li a:hover, #topnav li a:active
{
color: #F7F3ED;
}

[/code]

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. . .

Posted by Ken in Wordpress