Video: Menus Overview

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ProPhoto offers a flexible and easy-to-use system for creating customized menus in several areas of your site.

Click here for specific instructions on how to link to WordPress "pages"

Primary Navigation Menu

The primary menu of your ProPhoto site is the horizontal navigation menu located in your header area. To customize this menu, go to “ProPhoto” > “Customize” > “Menus”. The area near the top of the screen is where you add, delete, edit, and arrange the items in your menu.

Individual items can be organized by dragging and dropping. Custom drop-downs can be created by dragging items into other items. To delete an item, click on the delete icon visible when hovering your cursor.

To add a new menu item, click the “Add new menu item…” button.  Your new menu item will appear on the left side of the menu. Next, click the “edit” icon while hovering over the new menu item to begin customizing it.

Menu Item Types

When editing a new menu item for the first time, you’ll need to select which type of menu item it will be.  You won’t be able to change anything else about the menu item until you choose a menu item type. There are four main types of menu items to choose from:

1. Container for other menu items – Select this menu type to hold other menu items inside as a custom dropdown. Simply give the container item some Link Text, Save Changes, and close the editing popup.
   Now you can drag menu items into your new container menu item to create custom dropdown menus.
   You can even create container items inside other container items, allowing for multi-level custom dropdown menus.
2. Directly entered URL link – This menu type is used when you have the URL web address of something on the Internet you want your visitors to access. This is usually used to link to something on another website, like a page, image, file, or a video, for example. For this menu item type, you must provide link text and a URL.
3. Internal blog links – The type you will use most often – you can easily link to content within your WordPress site, like specific Pages, pre-made dropdowns of Pages or recent Posts, Category Archives, and ProPhoto image galleries you have created. After you select a menu item to be an Internal blog link, you’ll have to select which type of internal blog link from the dropdown menu shown. For most internal link types, more options will be available for customization.
4. Special link type – create many special links not covered above. Some special link types are dynamic, like the Twitter Feed link type which creates a dropdown list of the most recent posts from an account specified in ProPhoto here. Also found in this link type are Email link, Search form providing a box to search your site content, Subscribe by Email providing a box for visitor to enter an address to receive Emails when new posts are added to the blog, and links to Show/hide the Bio Area or Contact Form items.

Link Display Tab

For each menu item you create, you can also customize how it is displayed in the “Link display” tab of the menu item editing popup. By default your link items show as simple, text-based links. But you can also use an uploaded image, or text with an icon.

Secondary Navigation Menu

ProPhoto also gives you the option to add a second horizontal navigation menu, with all of the same flexibility of the primary navigation menu.

Vertical Navigation Menu

In addition, you can also create customized vertical menus, by clicking on one of the vertical navigation menu tabs in the “Menus” customization area.  These vertical menus work the same way as the primary and secondary horizontal menus, but they stack vertically.

To use a vertical menu, first create a menu structure in the ProPhoto Menus screen, then go to the WordPress “Widgets” screen and drag a “ProPhoto Vertical Nav Menu” widget into any area that accepts widgets.  Once you’ve added a widget, you can select the menu structure you created.