WordPress 3 comes with integrated menu management. Although still a bit quirky at times, it makes creating and managing (navigation) menus a breeze. However, now that creating and displaying a menu takes nothing more than one line of code (wp_nav_menu), we appear to have lost the ability to “manually” add our own stuff.

For instance, by design, there is no “home” link on any menu. Though it is easy to create a custom menu item in the menu management, there is an easier way, using WordPress filters.

The navigation menu can be “filtered”, and so can the navigation menu items. This allows us to add menu items at will.

Inspired by a support request, I did a bit of digging, the result are the following three code snippets, that you can add to your themes functions.php file and will add a login/logout link, add a search field or a Home Page link to your WordPress 3 navigation menu.