highlight parent page on menu when child page is on sidebar (and not on menu)

Question

i'm using twenty-eleven, i have on the menu 4 items : Home, About us, Contact, Clients it's a custom menu. The site currently is on localhost, so no preview is available. However i haven't put the child pages on the menu. (as a dropdown menu) I've put them on side bar. Now, Whenever i'm on eg Home page and select a child page from About us (our team) i want the About us page to be highlighted on the menu. I've looked almost everything, assigning classes, .current_page_parent but nothing works. Any help is much appreciated. :) Thanks

Answer 1

I do this quite often, actually, if I'm understanding your issue correctly. If you use Appearance > menus, and create your navigation (with dropdown/children), then pull in the Custom Menu widget into the sidebar, you can use CSS to handle the rest.

Basically, you just set the main navigation in the header to how the regular list items, but hide the children. Something like:

#header .menu li li {
  display:none;
}

That will show the main links in the header, but hide the dropdowns.

Because you're pulling the same menu into the sidebar via the widget, the classes you need to highlight the menu items (for the current page you're on) are already set - all you have to do it style them.