Navigational menus are vital parts of your site's design. They tell your site visitors where to go and how to access important information or areas on your site. The Menus feature released in WordPress 3.0 was an extremely significant addition to the already powerful software that allowed greater control over the navigational areas.
Similar to the way the drag-and-drop WordPress Widgets feature enables users to tweak areas of their sites without having to know a lot of code, the new Menus feature offers an easy way to add and reorder a variety of navigational links to your site, as well as create secondary menu bars (if your theme offers multiple menu areas).
Additionally, the Menus feature improved WordPress further by allowing users to easily create more traditional Web sites, which sometimes need multiple and more diverse navigational areas than a typical blog layout uses or needs.
Twenty Ten comes with the appropriate code in the navigation menus that make use of this robust feature. (By default, Twenty Ten offers only one menu navigation area to include a custom menu.)
To create a new navigation menu in Twenty Ten, follow these steps:
The Menus page loads in your Dashboard.
After you create your new custom menu, the gray modules to the left become active for you to add new links to your custom menu.
This activates your new menu in the theme for display on your site. As noted in the Theme Locations module, the Twenty Ten theme supports only one custom menu, defined as Primary Navigation.
Items you can add to your menu include the following:
Be sure to click Save Menu after you make any significant change to your custom menu, such as reordering or adding new menu items so they are reflected on your site.
After you save your navigation menu, you can use the drag-and-drop interface to rearrange your menu, as shown in Figure 1-14. Additionally, you can create subpages under top-level menu items by moving menu items slightly to the right beneath the top-level menu items. Not cluttering up the navigation bar and organizing content logically can be handy for sites with lots of page content.
You can also create multiple custom menus and add them to your theme through widget areas by using the Custom Menu widget, navigation areas if your theme supports multiple menu areas, or additional menu areas by inserting the WordPress template tag directly into your theme's template files.