How to add images and styles to the WordPress custom menu

Here are lots of excellent plugins out here for showing social media profiles on your site, but what if you want to use your own icons? And you want your client to be able to easily manage the associations to these social profiles? The solution is to start a custom menu in WordPress with unique CSS styles assigned to each of those menu items. But how?

Here’s what we worked on: A custom menu with unique icons for Twitter, YouTube and Facebook:

After searching the web for how to add metaphors to the WordPress custom menu, we tried the Custom Menu Metaphors plugin with no success. We even tried some crazy workarounds like trying to place the image path inside the navigation mark! WTW?! Crazy, but right. And it didn’t even work in the end. It printed out the character tag < reading the HTML instead of rendering it.

And then, we saw the set alight! In the form of the Cover Options pull down tab right here in the Custom Menu cover in adjoin of our faces! Well, really the set alight came from this post that told us where to look. How did we ever miss it? It was so obvious! Once you know where to look, that is. So here’s what to do:

Go into your Custom Menu (functionality added in WordPress three.zero) under Appearance > Menus
Click on Cover Options in the top right corner of your cover
Check the checkbox next to CSS Styles in the Show Well ahead Menu Properties
Start your menu
In your menu item, in the CSS Lessons field, enter the name of the CSS style you want to associate with that menu item. Just the name of the class without the cycle. Ex. “twitterstyle”
Go into your CSS file and add the style and add metaphors and/or styles as you see fit.

Tags: css css styles custom menu Design icons images screen options tips word press wordpress