[Prof. Paul King]

Hi Everyone,

There are a number of discrepancies that show up if you rely on the Menu Plugin:

I noticed that there is a mismatch between the actual menus available on the WordPress site and the listing that shows on the right hand side of the course site when you use the “Menu” plugin.

Page Display:
I noticed this when I re-organized the pages I am using for handouts into a single page – I removed the old pages from the menu plugin – but did not delete the pages from my site as they still have useful information that I don’t want to lose. These pages were still accessible directly from the course site. If you change the pages to be either draft of pending and not published it will correct the issue.

Order of Pages:
Also if you only use the plugin to set the order and hierarchy of the pages – the listing on the course site does not sync to this arrangement. To fix it you need to go into the pages themselves and set the order and the Parent-Child hierarchy here – then it will display correctly.

Import/Export:
If you use the export and then import feature to clone a site – you might do this at the beginning of next semester you will find that the Menu Plugin settings are not remembered and will need to be reset.

Summary:
The plugin works nicely as an interface but needs to be modified to make change to the Page settings. Perhaps we need to contact the programmer of the plugin or look for a better one.

Recommendations:
Use the Page display settings, (Pending, Draft, Published) and the Parent/Child Hierarchy if this becomes an issue for you.

Comments welcome-

Paul

[Maura A. Smale]

Thanks for letting us know, Paul, and documenting this so thoroughly! It’s true that the side navigation on the course home is based on Page settings rather than the Menu settings. This is something we will definitely look into for a future release.

Thanks,
Maura

[Scott]

I agree, these are nice notes. Thanks. As a general reminder, the import/export feature of wordpress is extraordinarily useful for transporting content of posts and pages, but it does not usually transport what we might call ‘the appearance,’ widgets, colors, headers, etc, and menus. I would be nice if wordpress thought custom menus were content (I do think of them that way), but I’m afraid–as Paul points out–they don’t. So when you import, you might feel prone to panic because the new site will look different. But everything should be there (especially if you’re importing into the same theme), and it’s just a matter of spending a bit of time rearranging things. Thus the import feature is really most useful for those of you who have assignments and things like that that you don’t want to reenter into posts and pages. And of course, if any of you want to import at the end of the term and would like one of us to be there with you when you do it, we’d be happy to.

Best,Scott