A theme may contain as many custom menus as you care to add. Each can be customized through the admin panel. Custom menus can appear anywhere in your site you care to place them.

To get started create a function.php file in your theme folder.  Next add a <?php ?> tag to your functions.php file. Your functions.php should contain one <?php ?> tag and all of the custom php code should go between the <?php and ?>.

Now add the code to generate a new custom menu. Add the following inside the <?php and ?>:

// Notify WordPress that you want to run a function when the page initializes
add_action( 'init', 'register_my_menus' );

// Here's the function
function register_my_menus() {
   // Call this function to register a new menu
   // Declare a slug-name and a display name for the new menu
   register_nav_menus(
      array('header-menu' => __( 'Header Menu' ) )
   );
}

The first line tells WordPress to call on the function resgister_my_menus when the page initializes. The register_my_menus function is defined below. This functions calls on register_nav_menus, which is defined by WordPress. This function receives an Array describing the menu to create.The menu gets two names. A slug name which is used in code to refer to the menu. The other is a display name which is used when the name appears in a page.

The __() function used to wrap the display name, as in __(‘Header Menu’) is a special function used translate your page in to other languages. See the codex for more information. This function is not required but is good practice to include.

For more info refer to the codex: http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_nav_menu

To use functions.php just create a plain text file named functions.php and add it to your theme folder. From here you will code that file that adds features to your theme.

Note: Every theme will have it’s own functions.php file and the features added by that file will only be in effect when that theme is active.

This post describes the basics of working with wp_list_pages.

wp_list_pages overview

The wp_list_pages function generates a list of links to pages in your WordPress site. The list is generated as an li tag with a title and a nested ul containing a list of links. For example, if your site had pages named About and Contact wp_list_pages()  would generate:

<li>Pages
	<ul>
		<li><a>About</a></li>
		<li><a>Contact</a></li>
	</ul>
</li>

Styling the page list heading

By default the wp_list_pages displays “Pages” within the li tag. You change the label and or add a tag to it by using the title_li option. For example the following prints Pages as an h3.

<?php wp_list_pages('title_li=<h3>Pages</h3>'); ?>

Or display no title at all:

<?php wp_list_pages('title_li='); ?>

Note! In this case the outer li and ul are removed. For example if your pages were About and Contact you would have:

	<li><a>About</a></li>
	<li><a>Contact</a></li>

Styling the page list

Each of the li tags generated by wp_list_pages is assigned the following class names:

• page_item
• page-item-id – Where id is the id number of the page

The class page_item is very useful. Note that it uses the _ rather than the -.

The class page-item-id on the other is less useful. WordPress generates an id number for each page. This number is a little unpredictable. Id numbers really have no rhyme or reason.

When a page is currently displayed the link that matches the page will also have the class:

• current_page_item

This is a very useful property that can be used to assign a style to the current page link.

Sample Selectors

The first step to creating a style for the page links is to define a selector that will target the links. Since all links will end up in li tag within the container element the descendant selector works well. For this example imagine the pages links are contained within an element with the id name nav

#nav li {...styles...}

To be more specific and target only the page links rather than all of the list items, the class page_item is assigned to all page links.

#nav .page_item {...styles...}

To style the selected page differently from the other pages links, use the class current_page_item.

#nav .current_page_item {...styles...}

To target the anchor tag within each of the list items generated by wp_list_pages, use the descendant or child selectors any of the following should work.

#nav li a{...styles...}
#nav .page_item a{...styles...}
#nav .current_page_item a{...styles...}

Sample Styles

Here’s a few ideas on styling the page links. Be sure to use the :link, :visited, :hover and :active styles.

#nav li a:link{...styles...}
#nav li a:visited{...styles...}
#nav li a:hover{...styles...}
#nav li a:active{...styles...}

Be sure to style the current_page_item after the other links styles.

Here’s a few more ideas. Make every link appear as a box. Set each anchor tag to display block:

.page_item a { display:block; }

Make a horizontal list of links with float. Floating the list may require that you clear the floated elements later in your page.

.page_item a {
display:block;
float:left;
}

Adding padding on all sides to expand the link boxes. Here’s an idea use the border-radius property to add rounded corners. You could easily create some tabs by rounding only the top corners.

Other options
The wp_list_pages method provides many options. For a full list of options see the WordPress Codex.

Here are a few possibilities. Since pages can be nested, use the depth option to set the number of levels of pages that will be displayed. For example depth=1 displays only the top level pages.

Use the & between properties. For example, the line below creates a list of pages with no title and a depth of 1.

<?php wp_list_pages("title_li=&depth=1"); ?>

http://www.pearsonified.com/2008/02/what_every_blogger_needs_to_know_about_categories.php

From here you start to wonder what kind of sites can make with WordPress? This question is tainted by the blog label. Since it started as a blog, WordPress.com us a blog hosting site, and it’s primary use is as a blog. Everyone’s first thought is that WordPress is a blog.

Really, WordPress is a Content Management System, or CMS. Originally conceived as a blog, it’s really just a site manager that stores site content as either posts or pages. Posts are elements that are added often, think of these as blog posts. Pages on the other hand represent content that is more or less fixed, think of this as a static web pages.

Working with these two types of elements there is a broad range of web sites that can be created. Not just blogs.

WordPress provides several methods of organizing site content. Categories, which are, well, categories. Categories allow you to sort content into groups that can be searched, filtered and displayed together. Categories also allow you style types of content differently.

Tags are another organizing tool that provide a free form method of, well, tagging content. Think of tags as keywords attached to content to provide a more detailed description. Use tags to build on the broad areas of content created by categories.

WordPress also provides a system of taxonomies. Think of taxonomies as a specialized tagging. Or, categories of tags. The taxonomy system is not activated by default. To use this you’ll need to activate this feature using the functions.php file. See this tutorial here: http://justintadlock.com/archives/2009/05/06/custom-taxonomies-in-wordpress-28

What types of sites can you make with WordPress? It’s hard to say how much you can do with WordPress. If you’re new to WordPress, I would that you probably do a lot more than you think you can. The tool is very flexible. The Admin panel is also incredibly easy to pick. So it’s pretty is to create a site and pass it to a client to manage with minimal instruction.

Here’s an article on sites using WordPress as a CMS: http://www.webhelpermagazine.com/2008/04/wordpress-wow-seven-top-sites-using-wordpress-as-a-cms/

Looks like I’m not the only one that thinks WordPress is a great CMS tool. Looks like Pakt Publishing awarded WordPress first place Overall Best Open Source CMS. WordPress beat Drupal and Joomla. Which are dedicated CMS tools. Here’s a link if you’d like to read more about this: http://www.packtpub.com/award

The problem, is these classes aren’t visible. At least not until you’ve rendered the page in a browser and looked at the source code. Which is not the way that accustomed to building web pages normally.

post_class() is a function that can generates the following classes:

• .post-id
• .post (or .page or .attachment, depending on the post type)
• .sticky
• .hentry
• .category-misc
• .category-example
• .tag-news
• .tag-wordpress
• .tag-markup

In a typical post_class will generate the following classes:

• post-# (where # is the id number of this post)
• post
• hentry
• category-name

If the post has tags it may generate even more class names. Remember an element may have any number of class names assigned to it.

You could look at the class names as two types: General and Specific. General class names are names that would be the same for every post on the same page. Like post and hentry. Specific classes would be names that might be unique for each post. Things like: post-# (remember the # would be the id number of the post). Some class names will be general and specific. Things like category-name (where name is the name of the category. The category-name might be the same for several posts, while not matching everything on the same page.

Tags, not shown above also generate class names. post_class will generate class names for each tag assigned to a post in the form of tag-name.

What’s important with all of this? Having WordPress generate your class names make your job of creating a template easier and give you more options when creating a template.

Rather than adding your classes to everything, let Wordrpess do it for you. To make use of these classes what’s important is to understand the general classes. These are applied to everything. These might have been the classes you assigned yourself. Instead use the WordPress names and save your self some trouble and standardize your templates and style sheets.

Use post_class by adding to a likely tag within “The Loop”. Remember that post_class generates class names that are specific to posts. That is some of the names will change from post to post. This means that post_class is best used on a unique element that surrounds each individual post.

The post_class method outputs class=”" along with the class names. Use it in this way:

<div <?php post_class() ?>>
... post content ...
</div>

Imagine the div above was contained in The Loop. The rest of the post content would be contained within the div above.

http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/post_class

so-you-want-to-create-wordpress-themes-huh

Interesting to note that the plugin is supposed to work with Flash anywhere it appears. So you can use KimiliFlash to put Flash into your header or other areas of your site.

Another interesting item is that the Kimili plugin uses SWFObject: Javascript Flash Player detection and embed script which is XHTML valid. The default Flash HTML code written by Flash and Dreamweaver will not validate.

There is an article about this on A List Apart.