Create a menu item with a blank title

Question

Before the questions roll in... I am using Advanced Custom Fields to add a selection field in the menu items to select a font awesome icon which is added before the title. The coding works great except for one small issue. If you want to create a menu item say a home link with only an icon and leave the title blank wordpress got in their mind that it would be a good idea to delete the menu item if the title is blank.

I am looking for a way to modify the save menu function to prevent the deletion of the item containing a blank title. This would have to be a function that could reside within the functions.php file as it will be built into our premium theme.

Answer 1

It took me forever to find a solution to this. I thought I would release my code here for anyone that needs an answer to this question. I had to use two functions in order to solve the problem.

The first function replaces the blank label with   to prevent the deletion of the menu item.

add_action('wp_update_nav_menu', 'blank_menu_items');
function blank_menu_items($nav_menu_selected_id) {
    $navmenudata = json_decode(stripslashes($_POST['nav-menu-data']),true);
    $k=0;
    foreach((array) $navmenudata as $data){
        if(
           isset($data['name']) && 
           isset($data['value']) &&
           strpos($data['name'], 'menu-item-title') !==false
        ){
            if(trim($data['value']) == ''){
                $data['value'] = ' ';
                $navmenudata[$k] = $data;
            }
        }
        $k++;
    }
    if(isset($_POST['menu-item-title'])){
        $k=0;
        foreach($_POST['menu-item-title'] as $key => $value){
            if(trim($value) == ''){
                $value = ' ';
                $_POST['menu-item-title'][$key] = $value;
            }
            $k++;
        }
    }
}

This second function simply removes the   when the menu is rendered.

add_filter('wp_nav_menu_objects', 'blank_menu_display', 10, 2);
function blank_menu_display( $items, $args ){
    foreach( $items as &$item ) {
        $item->title = str_replace(' ','',$item->title);
    }
    return $items;
}

These were the basic functions and I did not include the ACF code to make it easier to understand.