Create a truly unique WordPress menu

This little tutorial will show you how easy it is to create an image-based custom menu for your WordPress site or blog, similar to the screenshot below (taken from the Twenty-Eleven theme with header image hidden for clarity). It only works for a menu with top-level items only though; sorry, no sub-menus. I haven’t yet figured out a way to do this with drop-down sub-menus; when I do though, I’ll definitely do another write-up!

In this tutorial we are going to create a WordPress widget that displays Twitter Trends by region. We will use Twitter’s Trends API and update trends after a specific time duration using WordPress’ Transients API.

Twitter Trends API & WOEID

Twitter Trends: Twitter Trends give a general overview of what the millions of Twitter users are talking about the most at specific time on Twitter, which will give you some indication of what is happening around the world.

Twitter provides a Trends API, GET trends/:woeid, which is a RESTful API that returns results in JSON or XML format. You can easily parse the API request result and display it.

Twitter is using Yahoo’s Where On Earth IDs (WOEIDs) to identify locations for which it has trending data.