Wordpress custom field info in nav menu? - php

Question

I'm trying to get custom field info from a page into the nav menu. I've had problems with this before... I just don't "get" the walker menu and how it works.
Basically, In addition to the title of the page, I want to have it output the URL of an image and image description from the custom fields and create a menu item linked to a normal WP page.
In the nav-menu-template.php file, I've tried modifying the start_el function by adding get_post_custom_keys() like this with no success:
$item_output .= '<a'. $attributes .'>';
$item_output .= get_post_custom_values("product_image", $item->ID);
$item_output .= $args->link_before . apply_filters( 'the_title', $item->title, $item->ID ) . $args->link_after;
I've also tried get_post_meta(); and others with limited success. The best I've been able to do is either get one of the images repeating in all the links by specifying a a hard integer value. Or, I've been able to get it to output the correct post/page value in text but without an image.
Anyone know of a solution.. what I'm doing wrong?

Answer 1

It would probably be easier to iterate through your nav menu and render it dynamically. The below code will let you iterate through a given nav menu assigned to a nav menu location you would have registered in your functions.php file:
<ul id="some-menu-id" class="my-fancy-menu">
<?php
$menu_name = 'primary';
if ( ( $locations = get_nav_menu_locations() ) && isset( $locations[ $menu_name ] ) ) {
$menu = wp_get_nav_menu_object( $locations[ $menu_name ] );
$menu_items = wp_get_nav_menu_items($menu->term_id);
foreach ( (array) $menu_items as $key => $menu_item ) {
// at this point you can get the custom meta from the page
$image = get_post_meta($menu_item->object_id, '_custom_field_image_url', true);
$image_description = get_post_meta($menu_item->object_id, '_custom_field_image_description', true);
// here we are getting the title and URL to the page
$title = $menu_item->title;
$url = $menu_item->url;
$slug = basename($menu_item->url);
// this allows us to add a current class
if (basename($_SERVER['REQUEST_URI']) == $slug) { $current = ' current-menu-item'; } else { $current = ''; }
$menu_list .= '<li class="page-id-'.$menu_item->object_id.$current.'">' . $title . '<br /><p>'.$image_description.'<br />'.$image.'</p></li>';
}
}
echo $menu_list;
?>
</ul>