My client Sylvan Products offers many commercial building products on their site, and they wanted a way for visitors and customers to quickly find a product, so they had a custom Theme developed by another vendor. I was asked to rearrange the order that products appeared in the main navigation menu. Here’s an example of the menu system as you hover over a choice, like Concrete Form and it presents menus in three columns:
Normally in WordPress a user can define the order of menu items by manually dragging them into place, however for this site WooCommerce is being used, and this menu is actually showing Categories of Products. The problem was that the custom code in the WordPress Theme was not being sorted in the order that the client actually wanted. I was able to find the template file used in the custom WordPress theme, then update the display order of the product categories.
Another place in the custom theme also displayed the choices in a sidebar, so that code also had to be updated to follow the display order that the client desired.
Summary
Getting your WordPress site to look and act just the way that you want it to often requires customization. By using the popular WooCommerce plugin to add products with categories, it is possible to have menus that show products in multiple columns that are sorted in a desired order. The only downside of using and updating a custom WordPress theme is that in the future when you want to change the look of your site, it may not be simple to just swap out a custom theme for a commercial theme without having to customize the code again to control the menu and category appearances.
