Login

Your Navigation Menu

Home. When you first activate Thesis, that is where your navigation bar tells you to go. Home.

Go home. Doesn’t matter where you are on your blog, Thesis is going to provide you with a simple link at the top of the page to return to the home page.

But how do you go from this:

to something a bit more like this?:

Thesis features a simple yet powerful navigation menu interface in is options page which allows you to do a number of things with your nav menu:

  • Add links to your Pages
  • Add links to your category archives
  • Add links to anywhere
  • Customizing the text of the “Home” link

Adding Links to Your Pages

Probably the most common customization to the navigation menu is going to be adding links to the various pages of your site. These pages may contain your about information, contact information, or anything else that you would want to link to from the header of your site.

The option to do this is called “Select pages to include in the nav menu,” and all you have to do is mark the boxes of any pages which you want to include.

Adding Links to Your Category Archives

Categories can be powerful tools in your blogging toolbox. Perhaps you have on your blog a category of “Must Reads,” and you’d really like your users to have quick access to that category.

On the Thesis options page look for the option “Include these category pages in nav menu.” Underneath the option title, you’re presented with a box containing all of your categories. Highlight the ones which you would link to include as part of your navigation menu.

But how do I select multiple options in a select box?

Good question!

  • Mac: Hold Command (aka Apple) while selecting the categories.
  • Windows: Hold Control (aka Ctrl) while selecting the categories.

Adding Links to Anywhere

Got a page named “101 Things You Always Wanted to Know about Me” that you want to include in your navigation bar? You’ll notice quickly that a page title of that length doesn’t look the greatest, nor does it leave much horizontal room for other nav bar entries. So how can you shorten that to “101 Thing” without affecting the actual title of the page itself?

The “Add More Links” section of Thesis’ navigation menu options is the answer!

What this section allows you to do is turn a blogroll or links category into a repository of navigation menu links.

Here’s a basic rundown of the process involved:

  1. Create a category for your navigation menu links under Manage -> Link Categories. You can name the category anything you like, such as “Thesis Nav Menu.”
  2. Add links to this category under Manage -> Links. Feel free to set a target or link relationship for the link as these will be used in the navigation menu if present. It’s at this point that we’d create a link pointing to our long-titled page (example.com/blog/101-things-you-always-wanted-to-know-about-me) using a short title (”101 Things”).
  3. Return to your Thesis Options page and revisit the navigation menu options. The drop-down select box underneath the “Add More Links” header should now contain your links category.
  4. Select your category from the list, save your Thesis options, and visit your site to ensure the changes took effect.

Tip: If you are sure you followed the instructions correctly but the new navigation menu items are not showing up, check to be sure a cache plugin isn’t installed and sending a now out-of-date version of the page. Flush the browser’s cache to force the page to display freshly.

Customizing the Text of the “Home” Link

Make use of the final option for your navigation menu, appropriately called “Change your ‘home’ link text,” to customize the first link of your navigation menu. You could change it to your site title, “Main,” or just about anything else you could imagine.

Further Customizations

Looking for more? A number of customizations — colored tabs, implementation of the nofollow attribute, and so on — have already been discussed on the Thesis forums, a growing repository of everything Thesis!