Catalyst Theme Navbar Configuration

Menu navigation options are an important part of any site design, allowing a visitor to find and access your content easily and quickly.

Catalyst Theme provides a number of options to allow you to configure your Navbars to suit your site’s content and design.

Options in the Dynamik Child Theme then allow the Navbars to be positioned and styled as required.

First thing to note from the above is the the use of the word Navbars (plural), not just Navbar (singular).

Catalyst Theme provides for the use of TWO Navbars on a site, although you can of course opt to use only one of them.

Selecting Navbar Type in Catalyst Core Options

Catalyst Theme lets you select whether each of the Navbars is set to display or not, and if so, whether it is configured using the default Catalyst Theme settings, or a Custom WordPress menu which will need to be configured in the Wordress Dashboard (WordPress > Appearance > Menus).

For now we’ll concentrate on the default Catalyst Theme option.

Using two Navbars allows you to provide access to your content in different ways.

Each Navbar can be selected to display either Pages (such as About, Products, Services, Contact etc) or Categories (that will display the category archive pages of posts for the categories included on the Navbar).

This means it is possible to use one Navbar for a menu of Pages, and one for a menu of Categories, (or a different selection of related pages maybe) allowing visitors to find the type of content in the way they want.

Catalyst Core Navbar Settings

Here we have set Navbar 1 to display Pages and Navbar 2 to display Categories.

Let’s have a look at how that looks to start with:

Initial Navbar Layout

There are several Pages that are probably best removed from the Navbar 1 and placed elsewhere (such as Privacy, Disclaimer, Sitemap etc), along with the Uncategorized Category Tab from Navbar 2.

That’s easily achieved in the Catalyst Core > Navbars settings.

By clicking the [IDs] help tip, a list of Page IDs and Category IDs is presented.

Just enter the names of the Pages/Categories you expressly want to include, or expressly exclude and the Navbar Menu will be updated to reflect your selections.

Excluding Navbar Items in Catalyst Core > Navbar Settings

The Navbars now only show the main pages likely to be of interest to your visitors.

Updated Navbars with Minor Items Removed

Catalyst is also pretty flexible when it comes to how the Navbars are positioned.

As shown above, they can be positioned to both be underneath the header. Alternatively, either or both of them can be switched to appear above the header like this:

Alternative Navbar Locations

And alternatively, Navbar 1 can also be selected to appear beside the Header like this.

Locating Navbar 1 Beside the Header

The position of the Navbars is managed and dictated very easily using the Navbar placement options in Catalyst > Dynamik > Navbar settings

Navbar Placement Settings

Either Navbar can have RSS/Email blog feeds, Twitter, plain text or html included at the right hand side of it using the simple Catalyst Navbar settings like this:

Navbar Right Side Display Options

For this example we’re going to add some blog feeds to complete the configuration.

Of course, once they have been configured, you can then style them with borders, backgrounds, fonts and other design style parameters to make them appear just the way you want.

Navbars with Blog Feeds Included and then Styled

That’s how easy it is in Catalyst Theme to create and configure Navbars that best suit your site’s content and design.

Have fun.

David.

David Pritchard is the author of the Catalyst Theme Cheat Sheet – a 200+ page guide to help users make the most of Catalyst Theme. It has been made freely available to licenced Catalyst users in the downloads section of the Catalyst Theme forum. David also has a site that covers WordPress, SEO, internet marketing techniques and other topics not directly related to Catalyst Theme itself at http://www.FastStepInternetMarketing.com