Adding a Top Menu to Your Zippy Courses Site

By default, most WordPress sites won’t have a menu, or they will have a bunch of items on the menu you don’t need. Thankfully, WordPress makes it easy to set up your menus exactly how you like them.

You can find the Menu page by logging into your WordPress Admin panel, selecting Appearance, then clicking Menus. This will bring you to a screen like the image below:

This is the default WordPress menu - but it has a lot of stuff in it we probably don’t want. Let’s start fresh and create a new menu. At the top of the page, select create a new menu.

Now we’re starting fresh. Enter a name for your menu (this won’t be displayed publicly), and select Create Menu.

Go ahead and add some of your most important Zippy Courses pages to your menu. Here are a few we recommend including:

Dashboard - This page displays all of the courses a student has signed up for and has access to.
Course Directory - This page contains every course you have available for purchase. (Learn more about setting up a Course Directory)
Account - This page allows a student to make adjustments to their account, such as change their email address or password, and view their order history.
Login and Logout - This page allows students to log in and out of their account.

Note that certain tabs are situational. For example, the Login tab will only display if a student isn't already logged in to an account (and vice versa). Similarly, the Dashboard tab won't display if a user isn't logged into an account.

There are some pages you should not include in your menu. These are listed below:

Thank You - This page should only be reached when making a purchase. If someone isn’t making a purchase, the page will show an error message.
Buy - The Buy page is used to create the individual products for your course but doesn’t display any courses by itself. You don’t want to display it to your students.
Register - If a user visits the Register page without signing up for a course, they will be able to create a student account, but they won't be able to access any of your courses. Users are brought to the Register page after checkout (so that they can create a student account and access their recently purchased course), so there's no need to link to this page. Additionally, if you add a link to this page on your site, it's possible for bots to locate it and create numerous fake accounts. Save yourself the headache, and don't link to it.

You can also create submenus by dragging a menu item on top of another menu item. The nested items will appear in the menu editor like this:

These items will appear in a dropdown menu if you hover your mouse over the parent tab (on the frontend of your site).

Editing Menu Items

Each menu item can have both its name and visibility adjusted. When you select an individual menu item, you can set the menu item's Label and Attribute.

Label sets what the menu item will be named in your menu. By default, this is your page's name.
Attribute sets the Alternative ('Alt') text for the menu item. This text will be displayed when a user's mouse hovers over a menu item.

Displaying Your Menu

Once you’ve finished adding everything to your menu, scroll to the bottom of the page, and select Top Menu under Menu Settings. Then click Save Menu.

Just like that, your menu will now show up on your Zippy Courses website! You can modify this menu at any time by going back to the menu editor.

Why aren't all my menu items appearing?

When you add items from your Zippy Courses site to your menu, they will only show up if the person viewing the page has access to the content you add. For example, if you add one of your lessons to your site's menu, this menu item won't appear unless a student has access to that menu item. That way, you can add several course pages or course resources to your site, and Zippy Courses will only load the content the student has access to.