Extending a menu item in the Navigation block

[helgatheviking]

What problem does this address?

I'm the author of Nav Menu Roles which adds allows a site owner to hide/show some menu links depending on the visitor's user role.

In the old nav-menus.php, I do this by adding a user interface into the menu items:

But to my knowledge there's currently no way to extend the interface of a menu item in the Navigation block to display/collect additional menu item meta. Meta can already be saved/fetched via API as that was needed to get compatibility with the navigation editor in the Customizer.

What is your proposed solution?

I think some sort of extensibility is needed. How can plugins add their fields here? How can we modify the output, etc?

[mrfoxtalbot]

Thank you for creating this @helgatheviking.

I suspect this must have come up previously. @getdave, could you confirm if this is already being discussed somewhere else?

[mrfoxtalbot]

If you are not following it already, take a look at this tracking issue #35521 @helgatheviking.

[mrfoxtalbot]

Also, somehow related to #23745 and #31387.

[ndiego]

I was just alerted to this issue. You can add this functionality at the block level using block attributes and a custom UI. Then on the front end, you can use render_block() filter to modify the output of the block. I am doing this with my own Block Visibility plugin, which you could modify to do what you need. All the code is available on GitHub.

Since it is possible to add this functionality, I am going to close this issue, but please let me know if I can answer any additional questions.