Textpattern CMS support forum
You are not logged in. Register | Login | Help
- Topics: Active | Unanswered
[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.)
- 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
Re: [request] Bounty: Ultimate Nav Menu Builder
I’ll throw in $20 (poor)
Offline
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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