For some projects, it’s nice to output clean, well-formatted markup. Using theme template files enables great control over most of your (X)HTML formatting, but not so much for automated functionality involving stuff like widgets and custom menus. One of my current projects requires clean, semantic HTML markup for all web pages, but also takes advantage of WordPress’ custom-menu functionality to make things easy. In this DiW article, we’ll see how to enjoy both: WordPress custom menus and clean, well-formatted HTML markup.

The menu system in WordPress 3.0 was hotly anticipated. But perhaps unbeknownst to many average WordPress users, actually using this feature takes some coding work. In fact, even enabling the features take a bit of code. So if you have WordPress version 3.0, but don’t see the Menu item in your WP Admin Area (as shown in the Featured Image for this post), don’t worry. Until you implement the required code, most likely you’ll be seeing something like this: