Appearance → Menus, or Customize → Menus. Create a menu, add items, then tick Primary Menu under Menu Settings.
Until you assign one
Nothing is printed. Stoat does not fall back to a list of your pages the way some themes do — a header that fills itself with every page you have ever published is worse than an empty one, and it is the kind of thing that goes unnoticed for a week.
So: assign a menu. It is the first thing to do after activating the theme.
Where it appears
| Layout | |
|---|---|
| Logo left | Beside the branding, at the left |
| Logo center | To the left of the centred branding |
| Nav below | On its own full-width strip under the bar |
Below the tablet width (768px) all three do the same thing: the menu moves into the mobile drawer and the hamburger appears. One menu, rendered twice — you do not maintain a separate mobile menu.
See header layout.
How deep
The menu renders to four levels. Two is the practical limit for a header, and the honest limit for a reader: a third-level fly-out has to be kept open with the mouse across two boundaries, which is difficult on a trackpad and impossible with a finger.
A top-level item with children gets a small ▾ caret. See dropdowns.
How many items
The bar has no wrapping strategy — there is a point at which the menu, the social icons and the button stop fitting, and then things start to overlap. Roughly:
| Layout | Comfortable |
|---|---|
| Logo left | 5–7 items |
| Logo center | 3–4 each side |
| Nav below | 7–9 items |
If you need more sections than that, the answer is usually fewer top-level items with dropdowns under them, not a smaller font.
The current page
The item for the page being viewed is drawn slightly faded, and so is the ancestor of a page inside a dropdown. WordPress adds the current-menu-item and current-menu-ancestor classes and the theme styles both; there is no setting for it.
Styling it
The menu’s face, size, weight, tracking and case are the Navigation font control in Customize → Typography. Its colour follows the header text colour.