Diana van de Laarschot

jamocreations

The default custom menu in WordPress only allows checking the “Automatically add new top-level pages” (Appearance > Menus) or adding a Navigation block with all pages and all child pages (Appearance > Editor).
With Auto Submenu you get extra functionality to automatically include child pages into the menu.
NEW: ASM now provides support for the Customizer via Appearance > Customize 
NEW: ASM now provides support for Full Site Editing with the Gutenberg Block Editor via Appearance > Editor
<h3>Using it</h3>
Enable the plugin and go to Appearance > Editor.
For each Page in your menu, you now have the following extra configuration options:
<ul>
<li>Add child pages as submenu y/n; </li>
<li>child pages are ordered ascending by Menu Order;</li>
<li>specify the (maximum) nesting depth of children you want to show (max 3);</li>
<li>specify the title for the child pages. For this you can use %post_title, %post_author and other wildcards, see ‘Other Notes > Wildcards’. Default value: %post_title</li>
</ul>
Via Appearance > Menus and Appearance > Customize you also get the following option:
<ul>
<li>Check the “Automatically add new top-level and all its child pages to this menu (Auto Submenu)”-checkbox.</li>
<li>If this option is checked, all top-level pages will automatically be added and will automatically have all child pages added as submenu.</li>
</ul>
With the Free version you cannot control the nesting depth of the child pages, all subpages are added, regardless the depth of the page tree.
<h4>Wildcards</h4>
You can control the title of the menu items generated by the plug-in with the following wildcards:
<ul>
<li>%post_title</li>
<li>%post_author</li>
<li>%post_date for the unformatted post date: 2012-11-10 18:14:23</li>
<li>%post_date() for a formatted post date with the following default formatting: November 10th, 2012</li>
<li>%post_date(<your formatting here>) for custom date formatting. Example: %post_date(l jS \of F Y, h:i:s A). See <a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Formatting_Date_and_Time" rel="nofollow ugc">https://codex.wordpress.org/Formatting_Date_and_Time</a> for formatting options.</li>
<li>%post_date_gmt</li>
<li>%post_date_gmt()</li>
<li>%post_date_gmt(<your formatting here>)</li>
</ul>

Auto Submenu

Good, saved me from a lot of work. Bookmarked



Perfect!

Dynamic menus: Add a page to your menu and then let WordPress automatically add the child pages.

jessejd

Enhanced Custom Menu replaces the ‘Automatically add new top-level pages’ feature of wordpress 3.0 with an enhanced version automatically adding subpages to their respective place in your custom menu’s hierarchy. This plug-in allows custom menus in wordpress 3.0 to work like wp_list_pages with the ability to edit the menu from the admin menu editing interface. 
This is perfect for those who would like to automatically add subpages to their navigation menu on publish without editing core wordpress files. 
Enhanced Custom Menu also updates the delete menu item feature, when a page is changed from publish to draft, review, or moved to the trash, the respective menu item is removed. If the page is later added re-published the menu item will come back.
In 0.2 pages that have sub-pages are not removed from the menu if they are changed from published status. This retains the structure of the menu.
Note: You must have custom menus enabled, running wordpress 3.0, and turn on ‘Automatically add new top-level pages.’

Enhanced Custom Menu

This plugin alters the custom menu auto-add function allowing subpages and delete menu item after un-publishing a page.

Auto Submenu vs Enhanced Custom Menu