Add a Submenu to the WordPress Admin Bar

By  on  

A while back I wrote Add Menu Items to the WordPress Admin Menu, a post detailing how you can add items to the left side, existing "posts" menu bar.  Adding menu items has served me well but it's not as customized as I would like -- I'm still adapting to WordPress instead of WordPress adapting to me.  By creating a custom top bar menu, I can mix and match links all I want!

Like adding functionality to your theme and other admin area, the directives will go in your theme's functions.php file.  The code itself should be self explanatory:

function create_dwb_menu() {
	global $wp_admin_bar;

	$menu_id = 'dwb';
	$wp_admin_bar->add_menu(array('id' => $menu_id, 'title' => __('DWB'), 'href' => '/'));
	$wp_admin_bar->add_menu(array('parent' => $menu_id, 'title' => __('Homepage'), 'id' => 'dwb-home', 'href' => '/', 'meta' => array('target' => '_blank')));
	$wp_admin_bar->add_menu(array('parent' => $menu_id, 'title' => __('Drafts'), 'id' => 'dwb-drafts', 'href' => 'edit.php?post_status=draft&post_type=post'));
	$wp_admin_bar->add_menu(array('parent' => $menu_id, 'title' => __('Pending Comments'), 'id' => 'dwb-pending', 'href' => 'edit-comments.php?comment_status=moderated'));
}
add_action('admin_bar_menu', 'create_dwb_menu', 2000);

Setting an id on the parent menu item allows you to use the parent key for submenu items; the rest of the keys are easy to figure out.  With the menu created, you simply need to add the WordPress hook and specificity to add it!

Recent Features

  • By
    An Interview with Eric Meyer

    Your early CSS books were instrumental in pushing my love for front end technologies. What was it about CSS that you fell in love with and drove you to write about it? At first blush, it was the simplicity of it as compared to the table-and-spacer...

  • By
    I’m an Impostor

    This is the hardest thing I've ever had to write, much less admit to myself.  I've written resignation letters from jobs I've loved, I've ended relationships, I've failed at a host of tasks, and let myself down in my life.  All of those feelings were very...

Incredible Demos

  • By
    Basic AJAX Requests Using MooTools 1.2

    AJAX has become a huge part of the modern web and that wont change in the foreseeable future. MooTools has made AJAX so simple that a rookie developer can get their dynamic pages working in no time. Step 1: The XHTML Here we define two links...

  • By
    Hot Effect: MooTools Drag Opacity

    As you should already know, the best visual features of a website are usually held within the most subtle of details. One simple trick that usually makes a big different is the use of opacity and fading. Another awesome MooTools functionality is...

Discussion

  1. I you want to remove a menu item , here the code.

    add_action('admin_bar_menu','ank_remove_admin_bar_menu', 99);
    
    function ank_remove_admin_bar_menu($wp_admin_bar){
        $wp_admin_bar->remove_menu('wp-logo');
    }
    
  2. Isuru

    Thank you Mr. Walsh! I needed this. Awesome!

  3. This is super easy!though I wish they had some kind of visual interface to do this, as it is there is Joomla and Drupal.

  4. Gavin

    What would be great would be a WP plugin that uses the built-in WordPress “Links” (http://codex.wordpress.org/Template_Tags/wp_list_bookmarks) and creates WP Admin Bar menus for each link category, and then adds the links from each category to the menu.

    Seems like a nice way to leverage the built-in WP Links feature for something that would actually be useful.

    Shouldn’t be too hard to do …. I might have a go when I get time.

    Thanks for the article.

  5. Hasse Andre

    Hi.

    Thanks for this.

    Is there a way to open the URL in a new window?
    Here is my code:

    function create_dwb_menu() {
    	global $wp_admin_bar;
    
    	$menu_id = 'dwb';
    	$wp_admin_bar->add_menu(array('id' => $menu_id, 'title' => __('NEW MENU ITEM'), 'href' => 'http://website.com/'));
    }
    add_action('admin_bar_menu', 'create_dwb_menu', 2000);
    
  6. To have this open in a new window, add in the meta option, like this: 'meta' => array( 'target' => '_blank' )

  7. iLen

    Thank you. I much use this code for my next plugin :)

  8. Ovidiu

    Thank you, this works great, even after all those years.

    However, what I would need is a way to add this on the right, to the “top-secondary” adminbar menu, next to the user actions. I’ve managed to add it using this function:

    function get_support_link($wp_admin_bar) {
       $args = array(
          'id' => 'get-support',
          'title' => 'Need Help?', 
          'href' => '/wp-admin/get-support.php', 
          'parent' => 'top-secondary', 
          'meta' => array(
             'class' => 'get-suport', 
             'title' => 'Use the contact form to contact Support',
             'target' => '_blank',
          )
       );
       $wp_admin_bar->add_node($args);
    }
    add_action('admin_bar_menu', 'get_support_link', 99);
    

    the ‘parent’ => ‘top-secondary’ being the key here. Yes, I could use the same function to add submenu items to this one, but I need to add about 5 items (maybe more) and adding same function again and again looks awful. I feel that this can be done cleaner, like your function here, but I can’t figure out how to add this function to the ‘top-secondary’ adminbar location. Any ideas?

Wrap your code in <pre class="{language}"></pre> tags, link to a GitHub gist, JSFiddle fiddle, or CodePen pen to embed!