How to cusomize the menu?

[akanesakura]

Hi,

I’m new to wordpress and i like the dropdown menu plugin. I have a site that was built in joomla now i added a blog powered by wordpress, I also converted my joomla template into a wordpress theme to look seamlessly the same.

Now my problem is i have a dropdown menu in my joomla site, I want to add this in my wordpress blog using the plugin.

My Joomla Menu is structured like this.

Home – Joomla Index
Product – Joomla Product Page
  Product 1 – Joomla 1st Product
  Product 2 – Joomla 2nd Product
Links – Joomla Links
Link 1 – External Link 1 (ex. http://www.cnn.com)
Link 2 – External Link 2 (ex. http://www.google.com

Blog – WordPress Blog

Contact Us – Joomla Contact Form

I want to retain that structure in my wordpress using the plugin. I am using this plugin for it will be manage in my wordpress admin page.

[nv1962]

Not sure if I understand your situation correctly, but if you have several menu item links that are created / maintained by non-WP software (i.e. Joomla) or just link to external sites, you should simply replicate the menu structure within WP. One very, very simple way of doing that is using a nifty WP plugin (WP2.7 compatible) written by Mark Jaquith called <a href="http://txfx.net/code/wordpress/page-links-to/">Page Links To</a> which allows you to create pages (that won’t be shown themselves, and appear only in the menu) that redirect to wherever you point to. Together with the Multi-level Navigation Plugin you can create a whole menu, including links to external (i.e.: non-WP managed) places.

One word of advice, for purposes of SEO – say, you have a link within your site to the page:
http://www.example.com/catalog/products/blabla?id=12345
Don’t give a link relative to the site root, i.e. "/catalog/products/blabla?id=12345" but give the full URI instead. That keeps search engines happy.

Added later: to arrange and organize the hierarchical structure of your menu in a more friendly drag-and-drop way, instead of using WP’s current – and awkward – manual ordering method, you could additionally use either <a href="http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/my-page-order/">My Page Order</a> or <a href="http://joelstarnes.co.uk/pagemash/">pageMash</a&gt;.

[akanesakura]

Thank nv1962! I think Page Links To is a helpful plugin and i think it would do the job. Thanks ” title=”Smiley” />

[imported_Ryan]

[quote:e0pazst9]Don’t give a link relative to the site root, i.e. "/catalog/products/blabla?id=12345" but give the full URI instead. That keeps search engines happy.[/quote:e0pazst9]

The search engines don’t actually care if you have full URL or not, they’re smart enough to figure that out on their own. The SEO benefits come from sites which scrape your content directing traffic back to your site, and providing links back to your site. If you use relative links and your site is scraped by a splogger, then all of those links point to URL’s within the other site, rather than back to your own. By using absolute URL’s, this problem is solved as they will scrape the full URL. Technically they could rewrite those URLs, but in practice this is not usually the case (sploggers aren’t exactly the smartest developers around ” title=”Tongue” />).

There are SEO benefits to using absolute URL’s, but it isn’t a direct thing, search engines actually don’t care. The SEO benefits are from direct traffic and from the links back which offer siphon PR back to your pages from the splogger. Plus it makes it a lot easier for the search engines to determine what is and isn’t a splog.

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