Category posts as submenu items - wordpress

Question

Been searching for a while on this subject without any success. All I can find are solutions which involve using the Walker property of the wp_nav_menu, which I don't think is the right approach. I want to create a menu with the following structure:
Link that is a category
X numbers of submenu items which are posts belonging to the parent
category
And so on...
Do I need to manually run a loop for each menu item to retrieve the posts?

Answer 1

Try this in your functions.php:
add_filter('wp_nav_menu_items', 'add_productions', 10, 2);
function add_productions($items, $args) {
$cat = '28'; // define category
$productions = array();
$productions = get_posts("cat=$cat");
if ($productions[0] != '') {
$items .= '<li>Productions<ul class="sub-menu">';
foreach ( $productions as $production ) {
$permalink = get_permalink( $production->ID );
$items .= '<li>'.$production->post_title.'</li>';
}
$items .= '</ul>';
}
return $items;
}

Answer 2

This question and answer was very helpful to me, so thought I would add an additional solution that provides an option to insert the menu at any point in the existing core menu.
Most of the examples on the web show how to add an item to the end of a menu, this will help you add the new menu anywhere in the menu.
Here is the code to place the new menu after my "Home" menu:
add_filter('wp_nav_menu_items', 'add_gallery', 10, 2);
function add_gallery($items, $args) {
$cat = '1'; // define category
$pattern = 'Home</a></li>';
$productions = array();
$productions = get_posts("cat=$cat");
$temp_items = '';
if ($productions[0] != '') {
$temp_items .= '<li>Galleries<ul class="sub-menu">';
foreach ( $productions as $production ) {
$permalink = get_permalink( $production->ID );
$temp_items .= '<li>'.$production->post_title.'</li>';
}
$temp_items .= '</ul>';
}
$replacement = $pattern .$temp_items;
$temp_menu = str_replace($pattern, $replacement, $items);
return $temp_menu;
}
Hopefully this helps someone else...