How to handle many different menus?

Question

I'm developing a site that has about 200-300 pages, that each needs a custom side-menu, linking to primarily internal pages. So here's one sidebar:

• Link to /foo
• Link to /bar
• Link to www.example.org

While another sidebar might have this structure:

• Link to www.example.org
• Link to /bar
• Link to /foobar
• Link to www.example.org/ex

So what's the best way to do this?

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Current preferred: Using ACF?

Even though that Gutenberg is just around the corner, then it was possible to create an ACF-field, that is just a regular WYSIWYG-editor, as an extra field in the post. And then if it was blank, then it'd inherit the navigation from it's parent.

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2nd best option: Using menus?

If I used menus, then I would have to created 200-300 'display locations' in my functions.php-file. And it would be a mess, matching the correct menu with the given page. So I assume this isn't the best way to do it.

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3rd best option: Using a plugin?

I looked around, but couldn't find anything for this.

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I can't use widgets, since it would mean a widget per post, which would be a mess.

Any suggestions? Or are ACF really the best choice?

Answer 1

If I understand your question right, here is the code to show the list of page siblings (having the same parent). Call the function from the sidebar.

<?php
function show_page_siblings( $id ) {

    $parent_id = wp_get_post_parent_id( $id );

    // show only on child pages
    if( 0 == $parent_id ) {
        return;
    }

    $siblings = get_pages( array(
        'child_of'     => $parent_id,
        'hierarchical' => 0,
        'parent'       => $parent_id,
        'post_type'    => 'page',
        'post_status'  => 'publish'
    ));

    if( !empty( $siblings ) ) {
        echo '<ul>';

        foreach( $siblings as $sibling ) {
            echo '<li><a href="' . get_permalink( $sibling->ID ) . '">' . $sibling->post_title . '</a></li>';
        }

        echo '</ul>';
    }

}