How do I separate link levels in a custom menu walker?

I have encountered a number of potential solutions to this problem, one solution I have come across is to use a Walker as you suggested.

However in my experience all of the solutions have failed in one scenario or another. Common failures I have seen with different solutions that I have tried:

  • Secondary / Lower Level menus disappear when clicking into blog posts
  • Being forced to specify the parent menu item on each page that I show the split menu on
  • Solutions that rely on the page hierarchy, not the hierarchy in the menu manager

After dealing with this problem on numerous client websites, I finally set aside the time to build a proper split menu / secondary menu plugin for WordPress. My plugin doesn’t exhibit any of the faults that I have found with other solutions.

To use it you can either implement the widget (easy mode), or you can use the function in your templates wherever you would normally use wp_nav_menu (developer mode).

You can check it out here: https://mattkeys.me/products/wp-nav-plus/

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