Woo Hierarchical Category Menu

Insert an automatically generated WooCommerce product-category tree anywhere in a WordPress menu or page.

Instead of hand-adding every category to your navigation and re-editing the menu each time the catalogue changes, you drop a single placeholder item into the menu. On render, the plugin expands it into the live category hierarchy — nested to whatever depth you choose.

• Requires: WordPress 5.8+, PHP 7.4+, WooCommerce 5.0+
• License: GPL-2.0-or-later

Installation

1. Download woo-hierarchical-category-menu.zip from the latest release and install it via Plugins → Add New → Upload Plugin.
2. Activate it with WooCommerce active.
3. Open Appearance → Menus.

Using it in a menu

1. In Appearance → Menus, open the Woo Category Shortcode panel.
2. Set a title, adjust the shortcode if you want non-default options, and click Add to Menu.
3. Drag the new item under Shop (or any parent item) and save.

The placeholder stays visible in the admin, but on the front end it is replaced by the real category tree. Categories are resolved on every page load, so new categories appear in the navigation without touching the menu again.

Set hide_label="1" when you want the categories attached directly to the placeholder's parent — the placeholder's own label is then dropped from the output.

Using the shortcode

The same output works in posts, pages, widgets, and page builders:

[woo_category_menu depth="2" hide_empty="1" hide_label="1" name_case="title"]

It renders a nested <ul class="wbl-woo-category-menu"> with .children sub-lists, ready to style with your theme's menu CSS.

Attributes

Unrecognised values fall back to the defaults rather than erroring.

Example

[woo_category_menu parent="25" depth="3" hide_empty="0" hide_label="1" name_case="title" orderby="menu_order" show_count="1"]

Notes

• Generated parent items carry menu-item-has-children, so theme dropdown toggles — including tap-to-expand mobile menus — work on the dynamic levels.
• Generated items also carry wbl-dynamic-product-category alongside the standard menu-item-type-taxonomy menu-item-object-product_cat classes, if you need to target them in CSS.
• Uninstalling deletes the plugin's placeholder menu items and its stored settings. Your product categories and the rest of your menus are left alone.

Changelog

See the == Changelog == section of readme.txt for the full history.

2.1.2

• Fixed nested category submenus not opening on mobile. Dynamically generated parents now receive the menu-item-has-children class that theme dropdown toggles rely on.