Feel like linking your WordPress site’s presence with one or more of your social media platform profiles? Even using their logos from within that social media menu? Excellent!
This is able to happen with your WordPress in its built-in code since default theme Twenty Fifteen was released as a theme for the content management system. Online documentation article from the Twenty Seventeen WordPress theme describes the Social Icons Menu feature.
There is an available Social Icons Menu you can create on your WordPress, and it’s something I use myself on my WordPress installation. I found out this from the theme I use for my WordPress installation.
As of the first writing of this page on Thursday, August 29th, 2024, the theme I run with my WordPress is a child theme I made, designed, and continue to upkeep, based off of the default Twenty Seventeen WordPress theme – The website for the Twenty Seventeen WordPress theme is at Twenty Seventeen | WordPress Theme | WordPress.org, wordpress.org/themes/twentyseventeen/ (the link opens in a new tab).
I decided to choose and use the theme as a parent theme to make my live site’s actively used theme when times were closer to 2017, that’s why me using it now in 2024 is a bit outdated as far as current themes go nowadays. I still haven’t decided on another theme to use than the child theme of that theme for numerous reasons. One is the time I’ve put into the child theme so far. Two is lack of access to modify some of the child theme elements’ code using the program I modified said code with and not quite yet knowing another code program as well as the one I used for changing things to my likings. A third is that WordPress itself has changed more since I’ve made that child theme than it had (to my knowledge) changed for a decent amount of time, as far as I can tell. I can reference an outside source that mentions WordPress concentrating more efforts of their time spent on themes or plugins or such instead of changing the structures of the inner-workings of WordPress itself. That’s illustrated conveniently enough in the audiobook I’m currently listening to on Premium Spotify; around time 09m:45s in track number five. It’s the audiobook “WordPress: The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box (3rd ed)” and more info on that audio narration is found by going to WordPress: The Missing Manual: The Book That Should Have Been in the Box (3RD ed.) | Audiobook on Spotify (open.spotify.com/show/6EUgMxkSywwZ7tfMxvMCCp?si=y92uQ0d5QheSP4wB55lIBw&fbclid=IwY2xjawE9EylleHRuA2FlbQIxMAABHQ9BwSbcERwXg2NGMqxvX8_CHiyObGIuIovY4g5JUwPT53bLFNfNMx3Log_aem_uWYDe6D7v_wUjwegkWzJBw&nd=1&dlsi=f2d190f1c3234564 that opens in a new tab).
Now I say that yet to be honest though, I find that I’m not too tech-saavy. Meaning by my own standards and self-described ‘newsbank’ of what’s written about common knowledge to others doing WordPress things as similar to things I do with WordPress. I’ve waned and not kept up with trends and staples to know-how of newer-made webpage coding skills and happenings. Spending a bit of put-aside time scrolling through news sites I follow, it seems I am unfortunately falling behind the times with the things I was more-current with earlier in my life in the realms of upkeeping, modifying, and creating webspace online. I’m getting at & have in mind things such as basic HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and similar. And also using a code editor software and such as tools on my own instead of collaborating with another or a team of admin/creator/editor to achieve what becomes published and shared here digitally (I really don’t know hardly a thing on, for example, the language PHP which would help as WordPress has this language in it too and admittedly had to look into a few articles at a time each time I wanted to change or add or such PHP code in my child theme of Twenty Seventeen).
Screenshot of WordPress theme Twenty Seventeen documentation, found online
In the article the above screenshot is of, there is a hypertext link to “documentation from Twenty Fifteen” given (source: screenshot on this page). To get to . . . that “documentation from Twenty Fifteen,” head to “documentation from Twenty Fifteen [for usage of Social Icons Menu]” (wordpress.org/support/article/twenty-fifteen/#add-social-icons that opens in a new tab). The following two screenshots are of the Twenty Fifteen article on usage of Social Icons Menu.
Should you choose like me, for opting to publish your WordPress with a theme that supports the Social Media Menu feature I’ve discussed, the next screenshot of my WordPress dashboard shows you have to go to your installation of WordPress > Dashboard > Appearance > Menus in order to create and modify the Social Media Menu you’ve created. And be sure to have that menu selected in the dropdown list of your editable menus for working in your own Social Media Menu.
Hope this helped you with adding a Social Icons Menu to your already published or up-and-coming WordPress menus!
