Month: January 2013

How do I set my WordPress Menu to be different for guests and logged in users for WordPress?
I’m sure there is a plugin to do this, but if you believe that less is more this quicky will let you alter the main navigation menu from your theme. Your best bet is to use a child theme so that your changes will persist after theme updates. This is more a quick and dirty guide to get you started.

Step 1: Create the menus

Create 2 menus under Appearance -> Menus call them logged-in and logged-out
Fill the logged-in menu with items that you want members to see and the logged-out menu with public items.

Step 2: Alter the header.php for your theme

It should be said that these pages will still be visible to users guessing the URL’s to these pages.
To properly secure your pages you should either mark them private or password protect them or use User Access Manager

Having said that, the check is relatively simple: you can check for is_user_logged_in() and switch the menu around as required..
If you’re a programmer (in any language) you will probably understand what is going on, still I’ll take this step by step.
Let’s take Twenty Twelve as an example, you will need to find the code where the navigation menu is showed. In TwentyTwelve it is this line:

<?php wp_nav_menu( array( ‘theme_location’ => ‘primary’, ‘menu_class’ => ‘nav-menu’ ) ); ?>

theme_location refers to the configuration option in your theme (under Appearance -> Menus )
menu_class specifies the correct CSS class to be used when outputting your menu.
There are many more options, all of which are explained on this Codex page

Should you for example want to only show the menu to logged in users you can change it to:

<?php
if( is_user_logged_in() ) {
    <?php wp_nav_menu( array( ‘theme_location’ => ‘primary’, ‘menu_class’ => ‘nav-menu’ ) ); ?>
}

?>

Read this as “if user is logged in, execute the following.

Or maybe you want to show the menu named “logged-out” to all guests?

<?php
if( is_user_logged_in() ) {
    <?php wp_nav_menu( array( ‘theme_location’ => ‘primary’, ‘menu_class’ => ‘nav-menu’ ) ); ?>
}

    <?php wp_nav_menu( array( ‘menu’=>’logged-out’,’theme_location’ => ‘primary’, ‘menu_class’ => ‘nav-menu’ ) ); ?>

?>

menu basically does as you expect it to do, it loads the menu with the specified name (so you need to define it under Appearance -> Menus)

Now that you have seen some simple code, you might be interested in what else you can do! Just be sure to always make backups of your site, or better yet, use a separate site to test changes.

So you need to translate some plugin or theme to your native language and have been handed one of those pesky .pot / .po files?

You’re lucky the plugin at least supports language files, but unlucky that you now have a mountain of small lines to translate. You could download a tool like poedit and slog through the translation, but I felt there has to be a way to populate the file with at least some of the required translation, saving some of the grunt work. Fortunately Google delivers (although oddly I did not find the link through my initial google search!)

Google translate has a workbench for PO files: http://translate.google.com/toolkit/list?hl=en#translations/active

Obviously you need a Google account. This tool gives you a simple side by side workflow where you can see the original and edit the translation, but more importantly: Google will make a best effort attempt to translate your file for you!

Let’s take a wpjobboard po file as an example and upload this:

You select the orange upload option:

Then you proceed to select the .PO file with the original language. Be sure to save the result as filename-nl_NL (in case of the Dutch version). If you are unsure about the correct language, check your wp-config.php file for the correct name.

Once you select “upload for translation” the file will be uploaded and Google will attempt to translate the contents to the language you selected in the previous screen. This is where you go through the translations one by one to ensure they are correct.

Basically the blue entries are the ones Google believes are correct. The red entries were translated, but had some issues. Most automatic translation tools attempt to reverse translate their translations to verify. Red does not have to mean the translation is wrong, just that the system is unable to validate automatically.

When you are finally done you can complete the translation. The file -> Download… gives you the resulting file. This file will need to be uploaded to the location specified by your plugin.