Genesis Subpages as Secondary Menu

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Genesis comes with two built-in navigation menus: Primary and Secondary. On most sites people only use the Primary and list subpages as a dropdown. But this plugin allows the secondary menu to be auto-populated with the current section’s children pages.

So if you have a site structure like this:

• Home
• About
  • About Our Team
  • About Our Company
    • Company History
• Contact

The Home and Contact pages will not show a secondary menu. If you are on About, About Our Company, About Our Team, or Company History it will show the secondary navigation (Company History will be a dropdown under About Our Company).

I’ve used this on a few projects so thought I’d turn it into a plugin. I plan to be sharing a lot more little bits of functionality as plugins rather than tutorials so that I can improve it even when I’m done with the client’s website.

For advanced users, there’s a filter that let’s you modify the arguments that are passed to wp_list_pages. If you don’t want any dropdowns coming off the secondary menu, you could do this:

/**
 * Limit Subnav to one level
 *
 * @author Bill Erickson
 * @link http://www.billerickson.net/genesis-subpages-as-secondary-menu
 *
 */
add_filter('be_genesis_subpages_args', 'be_filter_subpages');
function be_filter_subpages($args){
	$additions = array( 'depth' => '1');
	return array_merge( $args, $additions );
}

One client wanted the secondary nav to only show secondary pages (using the above code), and a third nav to show up if there’s tertiary pages. Here’s how to add a third navigation:

/**
 * Add Third Navigation
 *
 * @author Bill Erickson
 * @link http://www.billerickson.net/genesis-subpages-as-secondary-menu
 *
 */
add_action('genesis_after_header', 'be_third_nav');
function be_third_nav() {
	if( is_page() ) {
		// Set standard args
		$args = array(
			'title_li' => '',
			'echo' => false,
			'depth' => '1'
		);
		// Get current location
		wp_reset_query();
		global $post;
		// Don't run on top level page
		if( empty( $post->post_parent ) )
			return;
		$parent = get_post( $post->post_parent );
		// If on a secondary page, get children of current page
		if ( empty( $parent->post_parent ) )
			$args['child_of'] = $post->ID;
		// If on tertiary page, get children of parent
		else
			$args['child_of'] = $parent->ID;
		// Build menu
		$menu = wp_list_pages( $args );
		if ( !empty( $menu ) ) echo '<div id="thirdnav"><div class="wrap">'.$menu.'</div></div>';
	}
}