Question

I am creating a menu manually and trying to include the search form.

this is taken from the WordPress Docs “Building a simple menu list” at http://codex.wordpress.org/Function_Reference/wp_get_nav_menu_items.

I have added an additional <li> element before completing the menu and added the search form.

            // Get the nav menu based on $menu_name (same as 'theme_location' or 'menu' arg to wp_nav_menu)
            // This code based on wp_nav_menu's code to get Menu ID from menu slug

            $menu_name = 'main-menu';

            if ( ( $locations = get_nav_menu_locations() ) && isset( $locations[ $menu_name ] ) ) {

                $menu = wp_get_nav_menu_object( $locations[ $menu_name ] );

                $menu_items = wp_get_nav_menu_items($menu->term_id);

                $menu_list = '<ul id="menu-' . $menu_name . '">';

                foreach ( (array) $menu_items as $key => $menu_item ) {
                    $title = $menu_item->title;
                    $url = $menu_item->url;
                    $menu_list .= '<li><a href="' . $url . '">' . $title . '</a></li>';
                }
                $menu_list .= '<li>' . get_search_form(false) . '</li>';
                $menu_list .= '</ul>';
            } else {
                $menu_list = '<ul><li>No Menu</li></ul>';
            }
            echo $menu_list;

The problem is in the output.

<div class=”mainnav” role=”navigation”>

<form role="search" method="get" id="searchform" action="/">
  <input type="text" value="" name="s" id="s" size="40" placeholder="Search" alt="Site Search">
  <input type="submit" id="searchsubmit" value="Search">
</form>
<ul id="menu-main-menu">
  <li><a href="#">Home</a></li>
  <li><a href="#">Sample Page</a></li>
  <li></li>
</ul>

</div>

Could someone tell me why the search is printing before the menu even though I specify echo = false?

Answer 1

If your theme has a searchform.php, you’re probably hitting Ticket #16541: get_search_form() ignores $echo if searchform.php exists.

Your workaround is fine if you’re just echoing the search form anyway, but if you need to capture the output in a variable, you can work around this with output buffering:

<?php
ob_start();
get_search_form();
$my_search_form = ob_get_clean();
?>