Adding archive years to my menu

Question

I'm Wordpress newbie and despite of reading many articles, I'm able to put archive years to my main menu.

Menu contains pages and I need to add an archive.

My current menu:

- Home (page)
- About (page)
- News (Category)
- Contact (page)

And I need

- Home (page)
- About (page)
- News (Category) - link to the newest year (2015)
- - 2015 (not category, just year when posts were added)
- - 2014
- - 2013
- Contact (page)

When I removed the last one category from year 2014, this year should disappear from my navigation.

When I add new post in January 2016, automatically year 2016 will appear in my dropdown, and 'News' will containt direct link to 2016.

Any idea how to do it?
PS. I really read many articles and see the WP first time (I'm a programmer). I'm able to do it using many ways, but looking for the best one, looking the best wordpress approach.

Thanks.

Answer 1

Hi Please follow below code do add dynamically year wise post under sub menu you want, I have added below code in functions.php

add_filter( 'wp_nav_menu_objects', 'ravs_add_menu_parent_class' );

function ravs_add_menu_parent_class( $items ) {
  foreach ( $items as $item ) {
   //print_r($item);//print each menu item an get your parent menu item-id
   // get your menu item ID use that ID in below code and you can remove this code after getting ID 
  }
  GLOBAL $wpdb;
  $years = $wpdb->get_results( "SELECT YEAR(post_date) AS year FROM wp_posts WHERE post_type = 'post' AND post_status = 'publish' GROUP BY year DESC" );



  foreach($years as $year){
    $link = array (
          'title'            => $year->year,
         // 'title'            =>($year->year == date('Y') ) ?  'News (Category)' : $year->year, // this is how you want to print latest year as "News (Category)" 
          'menu_item_parent' => '13',  // my menu id is 13 ie: ID of menu name test under which years links are displayed 
          'ID'               => '',
          'db_id'            => '',
          'url'              => '/'.$year->year  // to create url of menu item 
      );
    $items[] = (object) $link;
  }
  return $items;    
}

RESULT:

Other Case like you want :

Just use like below:

'title' =>($year->year == date('Y') ) ? 'News (Category)' : $year->year,

Thanks!