Go to main content

Textpattern CMS support forum

You are not logged in. Register | Login | Help

#1 2009-02-02 18:24:34

renobird
Member
From: Gainesville, Florida
Registered: 2005-03-02
Posts: 786
Website

[request] Bounty: Ultimate Nav Menu Builder

Something that comes up a lot when turning sites over to clients is the navigation menu.
I get a lot of requests to add/remove/reorder items in dropdown navigation. This invariably leads to at least partially hard-coded menus.

I know there are several techniques for creating dynamic menus – but none of them cover all the scenarios I encounter.

What I’d like to create is a “menu builder” tab for building complex navigation menus – something that is super easy to use and can be turned over to even the most non-tech client.

Think of it like a Frankensteining of adi_menu and stm_article_order (with a few extras).
(Both of those plugins are awesome – but not quite what I need.)

It would need the following features:
  • Nest sections (assign parents) – same idea as <adi_menu>
  • Exclude sections
  • Include links to articles in the menu structure
  • Drag/Drop the order of any and all of these items (including dovetailing articles and sub-sections). Probably using sortables from the jquery UI.
  • output nested <ul>‘s for creating suckerfish-like dropdowns.

Here are some screenshots to help illustrate what I’m thinking
(layouts hi-jacked from adi_menu and stm_article_order):

These nested sections would then show in the section drop-down.

I have no idea if this is possible – but it never hurts to ask right?
I’ve got $150 towards making this happen – and I would hope there are some others that would jump in to contribute as well.

:)


Tom

Last edited by renobird (2009-02-02 18:24:57)

Offline

#2 2009-02-02 19:27:23

jelle
Member
Registered: 2006-06-07
Posts: 165

Re: [request] Bounty: Ultimate Nav Menu Builder

Yup….that’s exactly what I need for my txp projects. I’d contribute for the bounty for sure.

Offline

#3 2009-02-02 19:50:08

mrdale
Member
From: Walla Walla
Registered: 2004-11-19
Posts: 2,215
Website

Re: [request] Bounty: Ultimate Nav Menu Builder

I’ll throw in $20 (poor)

Offline

#4 2009-02-03 03:29:28

renobird
Member
From: Gainesville, Florida
Registered: 2005-03-02
Posts: 786
Website

Re: [request] Bounty: Ultimate Nav Menu Builder

I stumbled across this page that has a few decent demos of sortable nested lists.
I’m not a fan of the interface – I much prefer something like the mockup I posted above.

Just gathering reference material at this point.

Last edited by renobird (2009-02-03 03:30:25)

Offline

#5 2009-02-03 04:33:40

jm
Plugin Author
From: Missoula, MT
Registered: 2005-11-27
Posts: 1,746
Website

Re: [request] Bounty: Ultimate Nav Menu Builder

What about combining the articles and sections into one “palette”?

Offline

#6 2009-02-03 07:36:44

lee
Member
From: Normandy, France
Registered: 2004-06-17
Posts: 831

Re: [request] Bounty: Ultimate Nav Menu Builder

I’m in for $30

Offline

#7 2009-02-03 14:28:09

renobird
Member
From: Gainesville, Florida
Registered: 2005-03-02
Posts: 786
Website

Re: [request] Bounty: Ultimate Nav Menu Builder

Dale, Lee,

Thanks! Hopefully we can get this off the ground.

jm,

I think (but not totally sure) that we are talking about the same thing.
Basically, my first 2 screenshots would be in a tab called Navigation (or whatever).
The last one is just to show that there needs to be a visual representation of the hierarchy in the section dropdown.

I could be confused – did you mean something different?


T

Offline

#8 2009-02-03 17:02:11

jm
Plugin Author
From: Missoula, MT
Registered: 2005-11-27
Posts: 1,746
Website

Re: [request] Bounty: Ultimate Nav Menu Builder

It’d help if I made halfway-decent mockups. The “Items” column is a list of all the sections and those articles, and you would drag whatever ones you wanted over to the “Canvas”/menu. This would eliminate the need for an explicit exclude-checkbox and parent-select. So it is the same idea but with less form controls.

Offline

#9 2009-02-03 17:32:21

renobird
Member
From: Gainesville, Florida
Registered: 2005-03-02
Posts: 786
Website

Re: [request] Bounty: Ultimate Nav Menu Builder

Ah.

I gotcha. If you’ve ever used Active Collab – that’s kind of how you add users to a project.
Not sure if that would get confusing if wanted to include articles in the menu (because I’d like to be able to re-order them as well).
Would articles be included in the “Items” list?

Last edited by renobird (2009-02-03 17:32:53)

Offline

#10 2009-02-03 17:37:06

jm
Plugin Author
From: Missoula, MT
Registered: 2005-11-27
Posts: 1,746
Website

Re: [request] Bounty: Ultimate Nav Menu Builder

Oh definitely – the canvas-menu should be sortable. In the “Items” column, you’d only be able to expand/collapse articles belonging to a section and drag items over to the canvas.

Offline

#11 2009-02-03 17:49:14

renobird
Member
From: Gainesville, Florida
Registered: 2005-03-02
Posts: 786
Website

Re: [request] Bounty: Ultimate Nav Menu Builder

Sweet. That would be perfect.

How about injecting the section structure into the “section” drop down (minus the articles)?
I think I’ve read that can cause conflicts with sed_section_fields.

This is one of the reasons I can’t use adi_menu – the subsections aren’t represented in the dropdown – and it gets too confusing to turn over to clients.

Last edited by renobird (2009-02-03 17:50:15)

Offline

#12 2009-02-03 18:15:48

jm
Plugin Author
From: Missoula, MT
Registered: 2005-11-27
Posts: 1,746
Website

Re: [request] Bounty: Ultimate Nav Menu Builder

If the plugin loaded late (order >= 6), it could modify sed_section_fields’ output if necessary. It wouldn’t be too hard to display sections in the sort and nesting order.

(Not sure if I’m going to do this though.)

Offline

Board footer

Powered by FluxBB