I was helping a friend start a new blog and we found ourselves in an interesting situation with WordPress where we needed to create a drop-down navigation that integrated links of both pages and categories, and have that navigation be manageable through the WordPress administration area. Have you found yourself in a situation similar to this? Oddly enough this was my first time where I needed something like this, and I found a plugin that works perfectly.

Dynamic Drop-Down Menus for WordPress = Multi-Level Navigation Plugin

The plugin is called the Multi-Level Navigation Plugin for WordPress. You can find the plugin and a more detailed explanation by following the link. Basically, the plugin gives you a new section in your admin panel that allows you to create multiple menus where you specify the url and title of each link. You then use this code to display your menu…

$menu = new stickymenu;
$menu->display_menu('menu=Main'); # Will display menu 'Main' here

Multiple Dynamic Drop-Down Navigation Menus

With this as you can see, you can create as many dynamic navigation menus as you need. This plugin extends WordPress in such a way that competes with the Drupal content management system and it’s dynamic menu feature. Where I ended up using this plugin was with integrated sub categories with pages on sub navigations. Basically, I had pages set up but when you clicked on a page, a sub navigation appeared that would display both sub categories and pages that relate to that page. Without the Multi-Level Navigation plugin I would never have been able to do this.

Update: 09/30/2010

As of WordPress 3.0.1 you can actually create custom menus where you can integrate both categories, posts, pages whatever you want really. This is now built in with WordPress Core and you no longer need a plugin to accomplish this.  This plugin still comes in handy however if you are need of creating a quick menu that needs “Drop-Down” like functionality and is dynamic at the same time. Totally depends on your needs of course as well as your ability to code. I would recommend coding this yourself into your theme unless of course you don’t have the ability to do so.