brendaegeland

A common web design pattern is to have a primary navigation with the top level pages, and then a separate 
navigation element on each page that shows only those pages related to a common top-most page. This widget helps 
to build those secondary navigation elements.
If your page structure was like this:
<ul>
<li>Home</li>
<li>About</li>
<li>— Our History</li>
<li>— Our Staff</li>
<li>— — Employment Opportunities</li>
<li>Services</li>
<li>— Widget Development</li>
<li>— Gadget Deployment</li>
<li>Contact Us</li>
</ul>
and you added the widget with its default settings to a sidebar, it would create a list like this:
<ul>
<li>About</li>
<li>Our History</li>
<li>Our Staff</li>
<li>— Employment Opportunities</li>
</ul>
on any of the pages in the About subtree. Notice that the top-most ancestor, About, is included as the first element of the list.
<h4>Options</h4>
<ol>
<li>Title. The widget title. If left blank, it defaults to the title of the top ancestor page.</li>
<li>Show Title. Maybe you don’t want a title. Just turn it off here.</li>
<li>Top Page. You can select one of your pages to be the top page, or you can choose Default, which determines the top-most ancestor of the page being displayed.</li>
<li>Menu Class. Gets applied to the outermost <ul> element.</li>
<li>Before Links. HTML to be inserted before links in the list.</li>
<li>After Links. HTML to be inserted after links in the list.</li>
</ol>

Subpages in Context

Lists pages and subpages for a given page, or the top ancestor of the current page and all of the ancestor's descendants

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.

Subpages in Context vs Auto Submenu