Dynamic Categories in 3.0 Navigation WordPress

Chris comments:

I've already tried this but it doesn't work because the wp_nav_menu encapsulates the menu in the proper div tags - this places it outside of that. What I need is the dynamic categories to be shown INSIDE the output produced by wp_nav_menu

enodekciw comments:

ok, so it wraps the menu. let's unwrap it ;)

function childtheme_menu() { ?>
<div id="access">
<div class="skip-link"><a href="#content" title="<?php _e('Skip navigation to the content', 'thematic'); ?>">
<?php _e('Skip to content', 'thematic'); ?></a></div>
<?php wp_nav_menu( 'sort_column=menu_order&container=&container_class=&menu_class=sf-menu&depth=3' ); ?>
<?php wp_list_categories('title_li='); ?>
</div>
<!-- #access -->
<?php }
add_action('thematic_belowheader','childtheme_menu',9);

enodekciw comments:

now it should generate plaind list items without the <ul></ul>. so just those two functions into <ul id="menu"></ul> or something and you should be good to go ;)

enodekciw comments:

oh, now I get your problem. you can try to solve it like this:

pass echo=false into wp_nav_menu().
use some variable to get the markup, something like this $menu = wp_nav_menu();
now you have $menu var which hold your menu markup, so now you can write some functions to manipulate it like you want, for example, you can write a function to extract list items, or just to get rid of the tags you dont need.
combine it with wp_list_categories();, wrap everything into <ul></ul> - now you have your menu working ;)

I would like to help and write the full code for you, but I'm leaving so soon that I won't be able to do that. But I will be happy if I got you on the way ;)

Chris comments:

enodekciw - you got me on my way. I had been playing around with this before i posted the question but wasn't able to get it working. Thanks to your help I was able to, and added all the nested ul / li mark-up which made it work just fine. Here is my final code:

function childtheme_menu() { ?>
<div id="access">
<div class="skip-link"><a href="#content" title="<?php _e('Skip navigation to the content', 'thematic'); ?>">
<?php _e('Skip to content', 'thematic'); ?></a></div>
<?php wp_nav_menu( 'sort_column=menu_order&container_class=menu&menu_class=sf-menu&depth=3' ); ?>
<div class="menu-cat">
<ul id="menu-category-nav" class="sf-menu sf-js-enabled">
<li class="menu-item" class="sf-menu"><a href="#">Categories</a>
<ul class="sub-menu"><?php wp_list_categories('title_li='); ?></ul>
</li>
</ul>
</div>
</div>
<!-- #access -->
<?php }
add_action('thematic_belowheader','childtheme_menu',9);

Chris comments:

Thanks for this Maor.