Add Descendants As Submenu Items

by Alex Mills

Description

When adding a page, category, or any hierarchical custom post type or taxonomy to your navigation menu (Appearance → Menus), this plugin allows you to optionally automatically add all descendants (children) of that menu item as submenu items.

In short, you’ll no longer have to manually maintain submenus when you add a new child page to your site.

Installation

Visit Plugins → Add New in your administration area and search for the name of this plugin.

Screenshots

The new checkbox that this plugin adds.
The child pages have automatically been added as submenu items.

Reviews

Problem solver

By Dominik (dom.kawula@gmail.com) on January 17, 2023

Amazing product to add all child categories to the menu (subcategories). It works in the fly!

A must have plug in!

By carlosvai on October 15, 2022

I really can't believe WP doesn't have a function like this built in. This plug in is amazing! I have a lot of categories in my menus, and we all know just how awful and difficult it is to add an item manually. This plug in saved me a LOT of time and I can't be grateful enough. One caveat to all who try it, if you are creating new categories, make sure you have at least one post or page linked to it or else it won't appear. And another thing, the items will appear in the frontend menu, not in the menu admin page. So be aware of that and test simply hitting F5 in the home page. Also amazing support, I had problems figuring out the issues I detailed above, and they were extremely helpful via the support board, so kudos to that too. Thanks again for this lifesaver plug in!

Still Works with WP 5.1

By flyingkites on March 5, 2019

Still works with WordPress 5.1 for Pages in menu. You need to add the Parent to the menu then save. Then edit again to see the checkbox to check the new flag. I was wanting to use it for WordPress Product Categories but it does not work for them (probably never did?). Only the parent shows for me. Be good if it did.

Wow! Should be a part of default WP.

By mlipenk on April 30, 2018

I have a very large site with over a thousand pages. There are many pages in sections and subsections, sometimes to four levels, used in conjunction with main sections. To get what I need for a menu, sometimes I have to use Custom Menu Wizard. But in doing so, I have to create some very large, tiered, non-auto menus manually... sometimes in the hundreds of pages. If a user adds a page or re-orders a page, I'd have to go back into the menu used by Custom Menu Wizard and add/edit accordingly to reflect those changes. With this plugin and a simple checkbox I've cut the number of actual necessary menu items to a fraction of before, AND the user can make changes as they please. What a great plug in! It should be part of the default WordPress Appearance menu creator.

Merece 1000 estrelas

By fabsmoss on February 18, 2018

Estou usando a versão 4.9.4 do WordPress e funciona perfeito.

Works great and it's clean

By Michael Dance (SeventhSteel) on September 3, 2016

Still works great. Much better than Gecka Submenu - it doesn't break the layout on the menu screen and there's no unnecessary pro version upsell. I hope this is updated at some point because its age is hiding it from WP's search results.

still working!

By lbrowning on September 3, 2016

This is such a time-saver. I am using this in conjunction with many nested Woocommerce product categories. The root categories don't change on the main menu, but it's possible the children will... so now the customer can change those until their fingers bleed and it just works!

Thank you 🙂

Changelog

Version 1.2.2

Fix fatal error in customizer when using taxonomies in menus.
Add POT file for translations.

Version 1.2.1

Minor update allowing for loading translation files from WordPress.org.

Version 1.2.0

_get_post_ancestors() will/was deprecated in WordPress 3.5 and no longer works. Parts of this plugin have been rewritten to more properly get post ancestors.
Bug fix: Don’t highlight parents of different types. Post types and terms can have the same IDs.

Version 1.1.0

Support for hierarchical taxonomies (i.e. categories). Props WPAddiction for the idea.
Translatable plugin headers.

Version 1.0.1

Fix sorting by secondarily sorting by title.

Version 1.0.0

Initial release!