I'm new to the forum. My Page Menu Bar has been less than properly functional for a long time.

No matter how I do settings, there are no child pages appearing as submenus. The question you answer to set parent child stuff is internally contradictory, and neither answer is working.

Don't link first level parent items in Page Menu Bar?

Default: NoSet this to No to replace the link target of first level parent items with <a href="#"> This will basically unlink the first level menu items that have children. The submenus drop down when pointing the mouse at the link, but clicking the link doesn't do anything. This is for users that want to organize their pages in main pages and sub pages but don't have content on the main pages. "Yes" means "Yes, don't link".

I have version. 3.7.3 and WP version 3.4.2. My WP may be automatically updating, which you don't recommend. Could some long ago update of WP have broken my page menu bar?

Also wondering if it is merely poor design or a crippling issue that I have both a page menu bar plus two menus in my right widget. Juggledad asks other posters if they use WP menus OR Atahualpa menus. If I understand the question, I might be doing both. I don't really want to do both, but I can't give up the working navigation for the crippled navigation. I would like to ditch the one on the right for a working page menu bar.

It is really confusing because Ata theme options talks about menu 1 being page menu and menu 2 being category menu, yet somehow I have three flavors of page menu, if you count the page menu bar. Categories are not something I use or care about.

I run farmers' markets and foolishly thought I could manage Atahualpa without being a programmer. Should I update the theme? I'm already so frustrated by those manual update directions that I will have to have my host do it. And worried that if I spend money on that I'll still have the same menu snarl unresolved.

You need to post a URL.

Just as running a farmers market would confuse the heck out of me, I can understand how running a website can be confusing. I take my car to a mechanic because he has the knowledge of how to fix problems that occur. It sounds like you actually do need someone to take care of your website.

I'll give you a brief overview of WordPress. WordPress is the main core of the software. You can add plug-ins which are little extra pieces of code and you can change the users experience depending on the theme you choose.

Each page is broken up into several areas: the header, the middle and the footer areas. with the Atahualpa theme, when we talk about menus we are talking about the menus that reside in the header area. Atahualpa, by default, will automatically generate a menu for all the pages you have created and/or all the categories you have created. This is done by adding the option %pages or %cats in the ato->style & edit header area->configure header area option.

you can also use a custom WordPress menu by building the menu in the dashboard-> appearance-> menus and then selecting the theme location for your menu. If you use theme location 'menu 1' the menu will go where you specify the %pages option. Location 'menu 2' will replace the %cat option.

You create some pages by editing the page and on the right hand side, in the page attributes section, you choose a parent page. If you're using the WordPress custom menus you create a sub page by dragging a page to the right of its parent page.

I hope this helps you out a little bit.

My page is http://www.locallygrown.org.

have you made any of your pages sub-pages yet?

I've had sub-pages designated via attributes for individual pages for a long time. I had the most basic architecture knowledge before I cried uncle. What I didn't understand properly until today is that of my custom menus, Menu 1 overrides many of the settings I have in the Ata theme options about the page menu bar.

Alas, I still had to go rearrange furniture, break some things and fix them in order to fully "get" what you wrote.

You did help with some of my jargon malaise, although I'm still bothered by the tortuously worded parent-child link Yes-No business I quoted earlier, and the various meanings of Menu 1 and Menu 2 depending on context of custom menus or Ata menus.

The furniture breaking stage was that I killed my customer menu, and the custom vendor menu became the page menu bar. I reconstructed a custom customer menu more easily than you'd reassemble a lamp.

The current situation is that I have a custom menu 1 that is driving my page menu bar, and it is pages for market customers. I have a custom menu 2 that is pages for market vendors, and I currently have that in the left inner column.

Once my right column had no widgets, a big hairy blog related default appeared, which I am suppressing on the front/home and some other pages where I want less visual chaos.

I think I have a choice now: 1) keep what I have done today; or 2) stop using custom menus (kill both) and see if the page menu bar functions according to settings afterward. If this worked I could create a single VENDORS CLICK HERE page with child pages that show up as subheads and not need two distinctly directed menus.

The seed of doubt is that I think I've always had custom menus, yet I remember the parent child stuff working properly in the page menu bar at some point in the very dim past.

Once you build a custom menu, the custom menu structure overrides all other settings.
Say you have page A, B, C and D and you edit page B and say it's parent is A and then you edit page C and say its parent is page B. things would look like
A
-B
--C
D
If you put '%pages' in the header options, Atahualpa will build the menu just as above.

Now lets say you go to the custom menu and build a menu called 'mymenu' and put D first, drag A under and to the right, then add C to the left and add D (yes I'm using D twice) below C and to the right you would have this structure
D
-A
C
-D
But when you go to the page you will still see the Atahualpa built menu.

If you go back to the custom menu and select 'mymenu' for menu 1, you will now see that menu on the page.

The 'custom menu' widget is totally independent of this, you could also put 'mymenu' in the custom menu widget, and have the menu in the header and in the sidebar. You can have as many custom menus as you want, but only two in the header - actually you could have the same menu twice in the header.

The best way to learn all this is to play and experiment and learn the vocabulary.