menu item active class for author.php

Question

I am building a custom theme. For the author.php file that displays an author profile with their posts, I would like my 'About' menu item to turn active (get active class).

I have tried:

add_filter('nav_menu_css_class', 'filter_handler', 10, 2);

but can't get it to work because author.php is not associated with any WordPress pages and is using default wordpress template.

Is there any workaround to it?

Answer 1

Two built-in features of WordPress make this easy to accomplish, without any code: body tag classes, and the ability to add a class to a menu item.

Any author archive pages will have the classes 'archive' and 'author' in the tag (along with others, including author-name and author-id).

You can add a class to a menu item by opening the Screen Options tab on the menu page and clicking the 'CSS Classes' checkbox. Add a class name and save the menu.

In your CSS, you can then target that menu item when the body tag has 'author' class.

Example:

body.author .menu-item.myclassname { active state rules here }