rallisf1

Ever wanted to be able to automatically have category and pages children automatically added to your menus? I’m sure I did and was disappointed to not find something that dead simple that works and doesn’t mess up with the theme or other plugins.
Now bear with me on this one as it is my first WP plugin for like a decade and the first ever to be shared so i kept it quite basic.
How it works:
<ul>
<li>On each menu item that is either a category or a page you get an option to automatically append their children as a submenu</li>
<li>You get to decide how many children to show and how they’re gonna be ordered (Title or Date)</li>
<li>And that’s it, all you have to do is create content and never worry about your menu again.</li>
<li>As promised, it doesn’t mess with the theme or other plugins, it just injects the children found in the corresponding place of the nav menu array when that is triggered in the frontend</li>
</ul>
<h3>Code hacks</h3>
There is no settings page for the plugin but you can change a couple default behaviours from the code itself
<h4>Changing the default maximum children number when the field is empty</h4>
<pre><code>$item->automatic_max = 5; just change the number at line 220
</code></pre>
<h4>Bring only direct children of Pages and not all ascendants</h4>
<pre><code>$children = get_pages( array( 'child_of' => $item->object_id, 'number' => $item->automatic_max, 'sort_column' => 'post_'.$ordering[0], 'sort_order' => strtoupper( $ordering[1] ) ) ); just change 'child_of' to 'parent' at line 226
</code></pre>
Upcoming Features:
Due to lack of time i will implement the following features upon demand. Please post your requests in the forum.
<ul>
<li>Settings Page</li>
<li>Submenu items ordering</li>
<li>Support for custom post types and taxonomies</li>
</ul>
Credits:
<ul>
<li>I have used the menu walker created by zviryatko (https://plugins.trac.wordpress.org/browser/menu-image/trunk/menu-image.php)</li>
</ul>

Automatic Submenu for Categories & Pages

Automatically append children posts and pages as submenu items in the frontend

David Mosterd

Tobias Schutter

Uses the native <a href="https://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_nav_menu" rel="nofollow ugc">wp_nav_menu()</a>. Add parameters to the wp_nav_menu() to enable functionality. 
Also, ships with one-click delete menu-items in the WordPress admin. Turned off or on using the screen-options. Sweet.
Examples
This will get the first sub-menu from the active branch and 2 levels beyond (menu + sub-menu + sub-menu):
<pre><code>wp_nav_menu( array(
 'level' => 2,
 'depth' => 3
));
</code></pre>
Show the current branch only:
<pre><code>wp_nav_menu( array(
 'level' => 1
));
</code></pre>
Aimed on simple use in various use cases:
<pre><code>// display first level in the header
wp_nav_menu( array(
 'depth' => 1
));

// display first sub-menu from the current branch somewhere else
wp_nav_menu( array(
 'depth' => 2,
 'level' => 2
));
</code></pre>
Another feature is it’s control over the css classes that are given to a menu-item. You might be faced with css selectors 
which you cannot change. The ‘codepress_menu_filter_classes’ filter can be used in your functions.php to set the class property:
<pre><code>/**
 * Change the classes of a menu item
 *
 * @param array $classes List current classes
 * @param object $item Current menu item
 * @param array $items Current list of items (per level)
 * @param integer $k Key of the current item in $items
 */
function codepress_menu_item_classes( $classes, $item, $items, $k ) {
 // mark the first item
 if ( reset( $items ) == $items[ $k ] )
 $classes[] = 'first';

 // mark the last item
 if ( end( $items ) == $items[ $k ] )
 $classes[] = 'last';

 // map the WordPress default 'current-menu-item' class to 'active'
 if ( in_array( 'current-menu-item', $classes ) )
 $classes[] = 'active';

 return $classes;
}
add_filter( 'codepress_menu_item_classes', 'codepress_menu_item_classes', 10, 4 );
</code></pre>
Simple Menu Delete
It ships with one-click delete menu-items within WordPress. 
This functionality was integrated from our Simple Menu Delete plugin and enhanced a bit:
<ul>
<li>Turned off or on using the screen-options.</li>
<li>Display is more in line with WordPress’s way of delete-links.</li>
<li>Works exactly the same now as the nested delete-link which is a click further inside the menu item.</li>
</ul>

Codepress Menu

Allows you to display a sub-menu, it's depth from there on and gives you control over the menu-item classes.

Automatic Submenu for Categories & Pages vs Codepress Menu