How To Exclude Draft Pages From Your Main Menu

Have you ever tried to set a WordPress page to draft status, after you added it to the main menu? I did this recently and expected WordPress to be smart enough also to update the main menu to reflect that change.

However, when I viewed the webpage as a guest, I could still see the menu item. When I opened that page WordPress only displayed a 404 not-found message. This is technically correct; but wouldn’t it be much better when guest users would not even see the menu items for draft posts? In this article, I show you two ways that I found the easiest to fix the draft in the menu problem.

Table of Contents

• The Complicated Way
• A More Elegant Way
• Conclusion

The Complicated Way

Obviously, WordPress wants us to modify the post state and separately update the menu (remove the page from the menu manually). Possibly this is a good idea for caching – but on the other hand, most caching is usually disabled for logged-in users anyway.

A More Elegant Way

Or maybe this is just a lazy way.

I looked into the file nav-menu-template.php in search of a solution that does the redundant work and modifies the main menu. We hook into the filter wp_nav_menu_objects so we can remove inaccessible menu items right before they are displayed!

Actually, it’s a straightforward process, once we find the correct hook and understand the filter parameter:

<?php
add_filter( 'wp_nav_menu_objects', 'pst_nav_menu_objects', 10, 2 );

/**
 * Modify the WordPress menu and remove entries that are not visible for the current
 * user. This applies to all menus (primary, footer, widget ...)
 */
function pst_nav_menu_objects( $items, $args ) {
    // If you do not want to modify ALL menus, you can check for the menu-location 
    // or other criteria here.
    // For example, uncomment following condition to only modify the primary menu:
    # if ( 'primary' !== $args->theme_location ) {
    #     return $items;
    # }
    
    foreach ( $items as $key => $item ) {
        if ( ! in_array( $item->object, array( 'post', 'page' ) ) ) {
            // We only check visibility state for posts and pages.
            continue;
        }

        $post_status = get_post_status( $item->object_id );
        if ( 'publish' === $post_status ) {
            // This is a public page or post. No other check is needed.
            continue;
        }

        if ( is_user_logged_in() ) {
            if ( 'protected' === $post_status ) {
                if ( current_user_can( 'edit_post', $item->object_id ) ) {
                    // The current user is the author of the password protected post.
                    continue;
                }
            } else {
                if ( current_user_can( 'read_post', $item->object_id ) ) {
                    // The current user can read the draft or trashed post.
                    continue;
                }
            }
        }

        // All positive conditions failed.
        // Current visitor has no permission to see this menu entry.
        unset( $items[ $key ] );
    }

    return $items;
}

Conclusion

Sometimes little problems like this might pop up while developing a client website. That is why I thought it would be a good idea to share the solution with you. I hope you can tick one more problem from your development list! 🙂

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