Add featured image to wp_nav_menu items
This is the code I came up with thanks to some help from a Wordpress StackOverflow answer that I can't find anymore (please comment with a link if you find it).
First you need to add the filter to the specific menu (you could add it to all menus if you want - just use the add_filter line by itself).
// Add filter to specific menus add_filter('wp_nav_menu_args', 'add_filter_to_menus');function add_filter_to_menus($args) { // You can test agasint things like $args['menu'], $args['menu_id'] or $args['theme_location'] if( $args['theme_location'] == 'header_menu') { add_filter( 'wp_setup_nav_menu_item', 'filter_menu_items' ); } return $args;}
Then you need to build out the code to get the post or category ID from the $item object passed to the filter. It's not as easy as you'd expect, as $item doesn't contain the underlying post/category ID, just the menu item ID. So I use the URL's to do a reverse lookup of the IDs.
This won't work for tags used in a menu, or custom taxonomys. I only needed it for categories, so this is all I built.
// Filter menufunction filter_menu_items($item) { if( $item->type == 'taxonomy') { // For category menu items $cat_base = get_option('category_base'); if( empty($cat_base) ) { $cat_base = 'category'; } // Get the path to the category (excluding the home and category base parts of the URL) $cat_path = str_replace(home_url().'/'.$cat_base, '', $item->url); // Get category and image ID $cat = get_category_by_path($cat_path, true); $thumb_id = get_term_meta($cat->term_id, '_term_image_id', true); // I'm using the 'Simple Term Meta' plugin to store an attachment ID as the featured image } else { // Get post and image ID $post_id = url_to_postid( $item->url ); $thumb_id = get_post_thumbnail_id( $post_id ); } if( !empty($thumb_id) ) { // Make the title just be the featured image. $item->title = wp_get_attachment_image( $thumb_id, 'poster'); } return $item;}
And then you want to remove the filter that you applied at the beginning, so that the next menu processed doesn't use the same HTML as defined above in filter_menu_items().
// Remove filtersadd_filter('wp_nav_menu_items','remove_filter_from_menus', 10, 2);function remove_filter_from_menus( $nav, $args ) { remove_filter( 'wp_setup_nav_menu_item', 'filter_menu_items' ); return $nav;}