Hide menu items from not logged in users

Question

I have a theme which automatically adds all published pages to the menu. Is there a way to override this and add some of the pages only when the user is logged in? I thought maybe there is a filter for the menu, but could not find anything that works. Note that we are talking about frontend menu and pages here and I installed the Kadence theme. Maybe some of the themes does not support this, I have no idea...

What I have already tried so far is add_filter() with:

• wp_nav_menu_items
• wp_nav_menu_objects
• wp_nav_menu_args
• nav_menu_link_attributes

None of these filters are applied by building the menu as far as I can tell...

Looks like its the theme's default menu....

Turns out all of these work if I add a new menu to the theme. With the default menu none of them works. I'll report this as a bug to Kadence theme developers, I am curious about their opinion.

Answer 1

You could use something like this:

// Function to hide menu items for non-logged-in users
function hide_menu_items_for_non_logged_in($items, $args) {
    // Check if user is not logged in
    if (!is_user_logged_in()) {
        // Define menu items to hide 
        // (replace 'menu-item-1', 'menu-item-2', etc. with actual menu item IDs)
        $items_to_hide = array('menu-item-1', 'menu-item-2');
        
        // Loop through menu items
        foreach ($items as $key => $item) {
            // Check if the current item is in the list of items to hide
            if (in_array($item->ID, $items_to_hide)) {
                // Remove the item from the menu
                unset($items[$key]);
            }
        }
    }
    
    return $items;
}

// Hook the function into the 'wp_nav_menu_items' filter
add_filter('wp_nav_menu_items', 'hide_menu_items_for_non_logged_in', 10, 2);

You could also use a CSS class that turns off display for specific items in the above loop; something like:

        if (in_array('hide-for-non-logged-in', $item->classes)) {
            // Add a custom CSS class to the item
            $item->classes[] = 'hide-item';
        }

Then adding that 'hide-item' CSS to your 'Additional CSS'.

Answer 2

Turns out all of these work if I add a new menu to the theme. With the default menu none of them works. I'll report this as a bug to Kadence theme developers, I am curious about their opinion.

For now I use the following code to hide my custom pages:

$page = get_posts([
    'meta_key' => 'my_frontend_id',
    'meta_value' => $this->id,
    'post_type' => 'page',
    'post_status' => 'any',
    'numberposts' => 1
])[0];
if (is_null($page)){
    $pageId = wp_insert_post($this->settings);
    add_post_meta($pageId, 'my_frontend_id', $this->id, true);
}
else
    $pageId = $page->ID;


add_filter('wp_nav_menu_objects', function ($items, $args) use ($pageId) {
   if (!is_user_logged_in())
        foreach ($items as $key => $item)
            if ($item->object_id == $pageId)
                unset($items[$key]);
   return $items;
}, 10, 2);

Note that the $pageId is integer here and the $item->object_id is string. I have no idea why WP is changing types. Maybe better to convert both to string and use === instead of using == to avoid misunderstandings.