Need Random Category Nav Menu

Question

I have set my category navigation menu to display home and 5 of my categories and their respective posts when the category tab is clicked, as that is all the space there is to display in the menu bar.

I have more than 20 categories and I want the 5 category tabs to randomly display the categories on each browser refresh, so that all categories have a random chance to get displayed within the 5 category tabs.

The menu code in my header template is currently :-

<div id="nav_link"><!-- links -->
<ul class="nav"><!-- Navigation Links -->
        <?php if ( is_home() ) { ?>
          <li class="first"><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>" rel='nofollow'>Home</a></li>
        <?php } else { ?>
          <li><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>"rel='nofollow'>Home</a></li>
        <?php } ?>
<?php wp_nav_menu( array( 'sort_column' => 'menu_order', 'container_class' => 'menu-header' ) ); ?>
</ul><!-- End Navigation -->

which displays the standard category menu.

How can I achieve this?

Answer 1

I don't think you can use a menu for that, as menus are created manually in the Admin Panel.

You will have to use wp_list_categories like this:

$categories=get_categories();
$rand_keys = array_rand($categories, 5);
foreach ($rand_keys as $key) {
$cats .= $categories[$key]->term_id .',';
wp_list_categories('include='.$cats);

Answer 2

Thank you for the help, it worked & this is the code I used :-

<ul class="nav">
<?php if ( is_home() ) { ?>
<li class="first"><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>" rel='nofollow'>Home
</a></li>
<?php } else { ?>
<li><a href="<?php echo get_option('home'); ?>"rel='nofollow'>Home</a></li>
<?php } ?>
<?php
$categories=get_categories();
$rand_keys = array_rand($categories, 5);
foreach ($rand_keys as $key) {
$cats .= $categories[$key]->term_id .','; 
}
wp_list_categories('title_li=&include='.$cats);
?>
</ul>