How do I display entries in the top menu based on conditions selected in the sidebar menu?

Question

Hi. I don't know ajax programming. I know HTML, CSS, little bit of php(so much that I am editing and customizing all the default themes, and learning along the way).

I have attached the UI of the page which my designer has designed. Now I am making this in wordpress. I have assigned the left menu as the category menu, so it has categories of all the posts.

I can create different templates for trending posts and fresh posts. So basically I will have then 3 templates for the category page (default, trending and fresh)

What I would like to know is how to display a separate menu for trending, fresh and default. Eg if the user is on default page (home page), then the category menu on the left will use the default template, when he is on the trending page, the category menu on the left will use the trending template and so on. Is there a simple way to do this ? Can I do this with ajax too ?

The theme is twenty fourteen child ..

Answer 1

If you have 3 templates, you can use the conditional check is_page_template to check which one is currently in use.

See https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/is_page_template/

Or if you weren't talking about page templates, but rather a specific archive template, you can get the current term id with get_queried_object_id.

See https://developer.wordpress.org/reference/functions/get_queried_object_id/

Then, you could register 3 different menu locations and make an if statement to choose between them when outputting the menu in the header file.

Answer 2

OK . So by following advice from MSTannu, what I did was

• I registered two menus with two theme locations in functions.php using the code below and then added individual pages in both the menus using appearance->menus from the admin section.

  function register_my_menus() {
      register_nav_menus(
          array(
            'trending-menu' => __( 'Trending Menu' ),
            'fresh-menu' => __( 'Fresh Menu' )
          )
      );
  }
  

• Then I declared in functions.php to find whether page is a descendent and made an is_tree function following some advice online. The code is below.

  // GET PAGE ID FROM THE SLUG, HELPER FUNCTION FOR IS_TREE
  function get_ID_by_slug($page_slug) {
          $page = get_page_by_path($page_slug);
          if ($page) {
              return $page->ID;
          } else {
              return null;
          }
  }
  
  // DETERMINE IF A PAGE IS IN A DESCENDANT TREE
  function is_tree($pid) {      // $pid = The ID of the page we're looking for pages underneath
          global $post;         // load details about this page
          $pid = get_ID_by_slug($pid);
          if( is_page() && ($post->post_parent==$pid || is_page($pid) ) )
                     return true;   // we're at the page or at a sub page
          else
                     return false;  // we're elsewhere
  };
  

• Lastly I added the two menus in sidebar.php and then checked it conditionally using if and else statement with is_tree and the parent pages trending and fresh . The code is below.

  <?php if ( is_tree('trending') ) { 
       wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'trending-menu' ) );
  } elseif ( is_tree('fresh') ) { 
       wp_nav_menu( array( 'theme_location' => 'fresh-menu' ) );
  } ?>
  

you can soon check out my site at this link to find out how it looks.

edit: I have improved the code and the way it works to make it just use one template for trending posts and one for fresh posts, among other things. I will post the code soon.