How to implement a conditional menu destination in WordPress

I have used this snippet to do something similar:

function add_login_logout_register_menu( $items, $args ) {
	if ( $args->theme_location != 'primary' ) {
		return $items;
	}
 
	if ( is_user_logged_in() ) {
		$items .= '<li><a href="' . wp_logout_url() . '">' . __( 'Log Out' ) . '</a></li>';
	} else {
		$items .= '<li><a href="' . wp_login_url() . '">' . __( 'Login In' ) . '</a></li>';
		$items .= '<li><a href="' . wp_registration_url() . '">' . __( 'Sign Up' ) . '</a></li>';
	}
 
	return $items;
}
 
add_filter( 'wp_nav_menu_items', 'add_login_logout_register_menu', 199, 2 );

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You will need to add a "Home Page" link to a custom menu using the Appearance -> Menus option in WordPress, and use a placeholder instead of a URL, e.g. "#dynamic-link". You can then do a "str_replace" on the string in the "$items" string in the function instead of adding the login / logout link at the end.

Hi William,

It seems that what I want to do in my filter function is find the "Home" li in $items and then change its href to the new "Home" if ( is_user_logged_in()).    Is it clear to you how to do that?

Thanks

Yes, it is clear.

Give the "Home" link a placeholder URL, e.g. "##home##"

In the filter:

$real_url = is_user_logged_in() ? "http://example.com/logged-in" : "http://example.com/logged-out";
$items = str_replace("##home##",$real_url,$items);
return $items;

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Job done.

Thank you!  I looked hours last night for documentation on how to bust open the $items objects and work with them,  and finally I thought, "You, know?  I'll bet William could do this in about a minute!"

You're the best!

But it's still not clear to me exactly what you're doing.  The first parameter to str_replace is the thing to search for and you've got "##home##".   How does  that find the highlighted <li> element below and how does the $real_url filled in line 1 work as a replacement for that in the menu?

 Thanks

Steve

Got it!  I ended up with:

Many thanks!

Thank you again.  A very useful tool to add to my toolbox!

Pleasure, Steve.

Looking at your screenshot above, you could have just added two links to the menu, one for logged in users and one for logged out users.

Yes.  Put in two menu tabs, both with the "Home" navigation label, and have one go to "Homepage" and the other gp to "login_home."  Then click "Logged In Users" for one and "Logged Out Users" for the other in Display mode. Thanks for that.