Adding custom text in items titles from wp_nav_menu()

I need to add something after each title of a specific menu called by wp_nav_menu()

I tried

add_filter('wp_nav_title', 'testing_stuff');

with

function testing_stuff() {
$item->title = $item->title . ' testing';
return $item->title;

}

without any success, i’m not familiar enough with hooking.

My purpose :

• when I called menu ID = 4;
• for each title of each item
• i pull out data from current page meta with $meta_value = get_post_meta( $post->ID, $meta_key, true );
• I add this data after the anchor text in a

So every item of the menu will have a specific data added to its content, data I could manipulate from custom field.

I would appreciate any clue that get me on the right path.

Thank you.

The following works, but with the following caveats. It will run for every menu, but it will not run for wp_page_menu, a usuall default callback if a menu can’t be found.

Finally, menu items aren’t necessary pages – so you may want to do some logic to check that the menu item you are dealing with is a page/post from which you want to obtain the metadata.

Here’s the code:

add_filter( 'wp_setup_nav_menu_item','my_item_setup' );
function my_item_setup($item) {
    //Use the following to conduct logic;
    $object_id = (int) $item->object_id; //object ID.
    $object_type = $item->type; //E.g. 'post_type'
    $object_type_label = $item->type_label; //E.g. 'post' or 'page';

    //You could, optionally add classes to the menu item.
    $item_class = $item->classes;

    //Make sure $item_class is an array.
    //Alter the class:
    $item->classes= $item_class;

    //Alter the title:
    $pack_meta_value = get_post_meta($object_id, 'test', true );
     if($pack_meta_value ){
         $item->title = $item->title.'<span>' . $pack_meta_value . '</span>'; 
     }

    return $item;
}

I would be interested to see if there was a better way of doing this, preferably a method which allowed you to check for which menu these items are for…

I’ve moved this from the comments. If you wish to restrict this function to a particular menu, you could try the following. This has not been tested.

First remove the add_filter from the code above. Instead insert into a function which is added onto an earlier hook, and conditionally adds the filter (say when the menu is ‘primary’):

add_filter( 'wp_nav_menu_args','add_my_setup_function' );
    function add_my_setup_function($args) {
        if( $args['theme_location'] == 'primary' ):
         add_filter( 'wp_setup_nav_menu_item','my_item_setup' );
        endif;      
        return $args;
    }

Finally remove the filter, once the items have been loaded, so that it isn’t called for secondary menus:

add_filter('wp_nav_menu_items','remove_my_setup_function', 10, 2);
function remove_my_setup_function( $nav, $args ) {
   remove_filter( 'wp_setup_nav_menu_item', 'my_item_setup' );
    return $nav;
}