Wordpress Custom Links in menu not working

Question

I am using a blank theme template to create a wordpress theme and I enabled menus by adding the below code to header.php:

<body <?php body_class(); ?>>
    <div id="navbar"></div>

    <div id="wrapper" class="clear">

        <nav> 
                <?php wp_nav_menu( array('theme_location' => 'primary' ) ); ?>

        </nav>

And I added this to functions.php:

if (function_exists('register_nav_menus')) {
    register_nav_menus(
        array(
            'main_nav' => 'Main Navigation Menu'
            )
        );
};

The menu shows up and works fine when I add links to pages but when I add a custom link to say http://www.google.com with the label Google nothing shows up in the navigation bar. When I view the source the custom link is not being populated at all.

testing with google.com

<nav>                  
       <div class="menu">
          <ul>
              <li class="page_item page-item-9"><a href="http://localhost/wordpress/anatomy/">Anatomy</a></li>
              <li class="page_item page-item-11"><a href="http://localhost/wordpress/history/">History</a></li>
              <li class="page_item page-item-7"><a href="http://localhost/wordpress/home/">Home</a></li>
          </ul>
       </div>
</nav>

My css for the nav is simple:

    nav {
    padding:0;
    margin:0;
    position:absolute;
    width: 900px;
} 
nav ul li
    {list-style: none;
    font-family: 'Numans', sans-serif;
    font-size: 15px;
    color: #ffffff;
    text-align:left;
    text-transform: uppercase;
    padding: 0;
    margin: 0 30px;
    display: inline;
    position: relative;
    top:-32px;
}  
nav ul li a {
    text-decoration: none;
    color: #ffffff;
}
nav ul li a:visited 
    {color: #ffffff;
}
nav ul li a:hover
    {color: #cccccc;
}
nav ul li a:active 
    {color: #ffffff;
}

I am very new to php and wordpress theming and I can't find anyone online with the same issue.

random_user_name random_user_name · Accepted Answer · 2012-10-16T15:56:45

The issue is that your theme_location does not match the name you assigned when you registered the menu.

When you registered the menu, you called it main_nav. Since you called it that, in order to display that menu, you need to change the call to the menu to reference main_nav, like so:

wp_nav_menu( array('theme_location' => 'main_nav' ) );

Wordpress Custom Links in menu not working

1 Answers