This is a question that a reader of mine asked in an email he sent me and it’s a great question because it highlights the functionality that WordPress provides it users that you may not necessarily know about.  When you use WordPress long enough you’ve probably installed and changed your WordPress Theme more than once.  In changing the WordPress Theme you go back to the system defaults for the new theme and this is where some people start creating new widgets on the new theme for things they have already created using widgets on old themes by picking widgets out of the “Active Widgets” section under “Widgets” in the “Appearance” section of your WordPress installation.  However if you scroll down to the bottom of this page what you will notice is that there is a section called “Inactive Widgets“.  What “Inactive Widgets” do specifically is that they hold widgets used on inactive WordPress themes.

Now for the fun part, to make an inactive widget active as you can see above, all you need to do is simply drag and drop the inactive widget and drop it into the active widgets section and once you’ve done this you can add it to the section of your WordPress site which saves you time and effort running and managing your WordPress website and it will keep the settings of the widget for future use.

How to Manage your Menus in WordPress

Most WordPress themes out there currently use WordPress’ core functionality to support menu management.  When I say “Menu Management” I mean to say that you can customize the structure of pages, categories and custom links that appear in the menus on your website in the backend of your WordPress website just like in the screenshot below.

If you’ve ever tried to control things like the ordering of items in a menu before you know that this could be a laborious operation requiring code changes, ordering of pages using some obscure numbering system or something else that is less then favourable eating up your time and patience.  I am going to show you how this functionality works in WordPress, how you can drag and drop menu items to change the ordering of what appears in your menu and how you can mix pages, categories and custom links to get the most out of your menus.  So let’s look at the Drag and Drop ordering of menus first.

Drag and Drop Ordering of the Menu

Drag and Drop Menu Functionality in WordPress

The great thing about this from a usability perspective is that you can drag and drop elements of your menu to get the correct order and hierarchy in your menu.  The top page is going to be the far left element on your menu and the bottom one is going to be the furthest right.  What is great with the drag and drop functionality is that it allows you customize your blog or website’s menus without writing a line of code or referencing JavaScript to control the hierarchy of the menu items.  As you will see there are a number of great things that doing this in WordPress allows you to do including creating custom links and mixing category, pages and custom links in your menu.

3 Types of things you can add to your menus

Adding Pages to your Menu

Pages – This option allows you to select pages that you want to appear on your primary and secondary navigation menus. You can setup page relationships that don’t exist necessarily on the pages themselves in the “Page Attributes” section of a WordPress page allowing you to change the parent and child relationships that are already set for pages in your WordPress website.

Adding Categories to Your Menu

Categories – Categories, unless you are using them from something else refer to the blog categories listed on your WordPress blog.  The great thing to note here is that you can add all your categories or only select the best performing categories from you blog (aka “the ones that people visit most”) and include those in your menu making it easy for visitors to find what they are looking for on your website.

Adding Custom Links to Your Menu

Custom Links – You also have the option to use and setup custom links which becomes useful if you are linking to other websites that aren’t contained in your WordPress website.  Normally, a few years ago and even today some people still “Hard Code” the values for these custom links (“Hard Code” means when programmers in code that doesn’t change unless modified at the code level which is a pain in the butt to change later on) into their menus but that’s not an issue in WordPress.  There is no custom code needed it add custom links to your menu now.

Can I mix Categories, Custom Links and Pages in menu setup?

The answer here is that you can do this in pretty much any fashion that you can imagine.  For instance if you had a page created for your blog you could then take categories on your blog and add them under the blog page and add a custom link to your LinkedIn profile.

Mixing Pages, Categories and Custom Links into your WordPress Menu

I really like the fact that menu management is so easy and fluid for WordPress users and that the sky is the limit in terms of customize where things go and how they fix together in this section.  If you’ve been wondering where to go to customize and manage your menu in WordPress then definitely have a look here.  You’ll be glad that you did and you don’t even need to know any coding to create it successfully.

If you use WordPress on a regular basis then chances are you’ve created posts and pages for your WordPress sites.  What you may not know is that you can set the visibility of your posts if you are ready to publish or currently working on an article.  WordPress has 3 standard types of visibility including:

1. Public
2. Password Protect
3. Private

Public – This is the WordPress default setting on post visibility so if you save a post without adjusting the visibility then everyone will be able to see the post on your website as you can see in the following screen shot:

Password Protected – This option gives the option to protect your article with a password that you give out to a specific person or group of people when they visit your website.

Once you’ve set up a password on the post you’ll notice that the article is marked “Protected” on your website’s front-end and has a field to enter the password.

After you’ve entered the password correctly the content will then appear however by default the article is still going to be marked as “Protected”.

Private -Much like it sounds this setting will keep your post from being visible to anyone on your website.  This is helpful if you are still editing your article and you aren’t ready to publish it just yet.

Depending on how you use WordPress posts its good to know that these visibility options can suite some of your publishing needs depending on what you want to display on your website or blog.