Can you Display WordPress Recent Posts in a Drop Down Menu?

When you decide to use WordPress for your CMS and you back it up with excellent WordPress Hosting, you gain plenty of power. You can do so much with WordPress including displaying your recent posts in a drop down menu.

Why Should you Use a Dropdown for Recent Posts?

Not everybody will require a drop down menu for recent posts in WordPress. However, if you want to use this option, it’s very easy to do and can help you organize your recent posts very easily.

Often, WordPress websites will use the built-in recent posts widget to add them to a sidebar or another widget ready area. This will display a list of your most recent posts. However, if you want to display more than just five or ten posts, you will take up a large amount of space in your sidebar.

When you need a more compact way to display your recent posts, you can use a dropdown or collapsible menu. This helps to save space and it can easily be added to your site without any manual coding.

You can, of course, manually code this type of menu into your theme or even create your own plugin for the task. However, you don’t have to worry if you are not a developer or familiar with code. There is already an easy-to-use plugin available free of charge for displaying recent posts in a drop down menu for WordPress.

Using the Collapse-O-Matic Plugin

The Collapse-O-Matic plugin for WordPress will allow you to display recent posts as a drop down menu on your WordPress website. The plugins allows you to add anything to the menu by using shortcode.

You will need to add a little bit of code to your theme’s function.php file to display recent posts anywhere you want. Just add the following code:

Menu Code

Now, you will be able to use the shortcode

[recentposts] to display you recent posts in a drop down menu. You just need to add the shortcode into the Collapse-O-Matic shortcode and create a list of recent posts. The shortcode you will add looks like this:

[expand title=”Recent Posts”][recentposts][/expand]

This shortcode can be used in a post, page, text widget or anywhere on your WordPress site.

The Collapse-O-Matic plugin is only one of the choices you can use to create custom drop down menus to display your recent posts in WordPress. You can also choose the Dropdown Menu Widget plug in, which will allow you to add beautiful drop down menus for listing your recent posts, pages or anything else you prefer.

There are several other plugins out there for drop down menus for recent posts. Collapse-O-Matic is the easiest one to work with and makes it simple to display your recent posts in a more organized way.