Creating and populating custom nav menu (menu-item-position not working)

Question

Im automatically creating pages with the below code, after that I create a custom menu and insert all the pages to this menu.

$create_pages = array('Home', 'About', 'Contact'); // there will be more items
$count = 1; 
foreach ($create_pages as $new_page) {
    $add_pages = array(
        'post_title' => $new_page,
        'post_content' => '',
        'post_status' => 'publish',
        'post_type' => 'page',
        'menu_order' => $count++ // incrementing the order value to overwrite default alphabetical ordering
    );
    $page_id = wp_insert_post($add_pages);
}

So far I managed to actually overwrite the default alphabetical ordering and now on the Pages screen, all the pages are ordered the way I want.

$main_nav_id = wp_create_nav_menu('Main menu', array('slug' => 'main-nav'));
set_theme_mod('nav_menu_locations', array('main-nav' => $main_nav_id));

$pages = get_pages();
$count = 1; 
foreach($pages as $page) {
    $item = array(
        'menu-item-object-id' => $page->ID,
        'menu-item-object' => 'page',
        'menu-item-type' => 'post_type',
        'menu-item-status' => 'publish',
        'menu-item-position' => $count++ // im trying to use the same approach
    );
    wp_update_nav_menu_item($main_nav_id, 0, $item);
}

So with this code, Im trying to use the same approach as I did before with the pages, but whatever I try, the menu items are still ordered in a weird way, I just want them to be ordered the same way as they are ordered on the Pages screen. How could I fix this?

Answer 1

You don't set sort_column to menu_order when you call get_pages, so it defaults to sorting on post_title.

$pages = get_pages( array( 'sort_column' => 'menu_order' ) );