Extend the TwentyEleven Navigation with your Social Icons

In this little tutorial we show how to add in the navigation of the TwentyEleven Theme our RSS Feed, a link with icons to our Twitter page and to our Facebook profile. Without writing a single line of PHP code. You are able to accomplish this with the WordPress Menu.

First we go in the backend to Design-> Menu and activate the CSS Classes. Therefore we click on “Screen Options” on the very top right corner. And unter “Show advanced menu properties” you check the box for “CSS Classes” and close the Screen Options.

After that we use the “Custom Links” to create the menu entries. We add the addresses to our RSS Feed, Facebook and Twitter and add them to the menu. There we assign the 3 menu entries to the CSS Classes. RSS Feed has the class rss, Twitter the class twitter and Facebook facebook. Don’t forget to save.

I prepared a sprite, which you can download with a right mouse click->Save Image As… . You have to save this sprite into the folder twentyeleven/images/.

Then we open the file TwentyEleven style.css with a text editor and add at the end of the Menu block #access our additional CSS. We do not have much to add. We let our 3 list items float to the right, push the text out of view and position the graphic. Only for the hover, focus and active states, we must define a little tricky CSS rule in order to circumvent the background gradients of TwentyEleven.

#access .twitter, #access .rss, #access .facebook {
	float: right;
}
#access .twitter a, #access .rss a, #access .facebook a {
	background: transparent url(images/social-sprite.png) 0 0 no-repeat;
	padding: 0;
	text-indent: -9999px;
	width: 70px;
}
#access .rss a { background-position: 0 0; }
#access .facebook a { background-position: 0 -96px; }
#access .twitter a { background-position: 0 -48px; }
#access .rss a:hover, #access .rss a:focus, #access .rss a:active {
	background: transparent url(images/social-sprite.png) 0 -144px no-repeat;
}
#access .twitter a:hover, #access .twitter a:focus, #access .twitter a:active {
	background: transparent url(images/social-sprite.png) 0 -192px no-repeat;
}
#access .facebook a:hover, #access .facebook a:focus, #access .facebook a:active {
	background: transparent url(images/social-sprite.png) 0 -240px no-repeat;
}

This is just an example to experiment. Add your Google+ profile and expand this example with cool CSS tricks!