Dropdown menu in widget – link to post

[dhrose]

I've been trying to figure a way to link to posts from a widget with a drop down menu… but all the plugins link to a category or tag, and the archive – not the post itself. Is that difficult to do in wordpress other than to make a custom menu? A byproduct of the Blog nature of the application? I was thinking to put everything on posts instead of pages so I could search more efficiently but it seems impossible to go to the actual item from a category or tag listing/menu.

Thanks!

[Jami Howard Mays]

I think it's probably not a good idea to do posts instead of pages -- you're trying to use them against their intended purpose. If you created a menu with your posts, you'd have to go through and add a new menu item every time you wrote a new post -- not impossible, but not the best use either.

Here's the best analogy I've come up with:

Pages are like loose-leaf sheets of paper. We use menus to put them in groups (stapling the looseleaf pages together) and we can use sidebar widgets like the Genesis Featured Page widget to stick particular pages up in the sidebar/footer of our site (like pushing a thumbtack through a specific page).

Posts are more like pages inside a three-ring binder. They can pulled out individually, but they can also be read, "cover to cover" in chronological order. We can also reorder the posts based on taxonomies, like tags or categories (think of these like tabbed dividers in your three ring binder). So, I can pull out all of the posts that are about, for example, "animals" using the animals tag, sort them by date and put them back in a three ring binder.

If your content is such that it could be read cover-to-cover, page-turning style, then posts makes more sense. If your content is such that each page is independent from one another, then you should use pages.

Pages and Posts are equally as valuable and have the same search quality within your site.

You could, if you wanted, use the Featured Posts Widget in a sidebar and create a list of your posts - just don't make the featured image or content visible, only the title - but that wouldn't make them a drop down.

Also, consider your user's experience -- if your user clicks on a drop down and you've got 5 posts in the menu, it's not too difficult to navigate. If your user opens the drop down menu and there's dozens of post titles, some pushing themselves onto more than one line, your user isn't going to have a great experience with that.

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Jami Howard Mays, HBIC, Imaj Works | Athens, Georgia

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