[plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

nighthawk · 2006-10-03 13:17:28

I have identified the bug – wow, this was really difficult. Thanks to everyone who notified me of this – bug is fixed, new version (1.0 RC2) is available for download. Thanks for your patience!

Last edited by nighthawk (2006-10-03 14:41:01)

nighthawk · 2006-12-23 20:06:31

Has anybody already tried the plugin with Textpattern 4.0.4? Any problems? If so, please post them here, and I’ll try to fix them asap. Thanks!

nighthawk · 2007-01-07 16:22:31

Fixed minor CSS display issues on admin screen with TXP 4.0.4. Added conditional tag which checks if the current category belongs to a given parent category. Final amendments.

And here we are: wow_menu 1.0 is released!
The wishlist for future versions is open again. :)

WebKat · 2007-01-22 06:05:56

I’m feeling very stupid. The plugin works great insofar as it shows the right information, but for the life of me, nothing I try to add to the CSS file is having any effect on the way the menu looks! Right now it’s too wide for the column it is in, the indent is waaaaaay too big on the child categories, and the text is way too small. However, nothing I do touches it. I’m using “menutree” as the name, but menutree, #menutree, .menutree, div#menutree… none of them seem to do anything. I also tried a bunch of other permutations (spent over an hour in all) but nothing is working. Can someone please, please, please post an example of their CSS?

For example, my other left-column lists are controlled with this:

div#leftmenu li { padding:0 0 2px 55px; margin:0; font-weight:bold; font-size:.75em; list-style-type:none; text-decoration: none; border:0; }

nighthawk · 2007-01-22 09:10:09

Hi,

you should make sure that especially the nested elements are properly formatted (don’t forget that if you format <li>s etc., its attributes will be applied to child <li>swithin the menutree as well, unless you explicitly format them otherwise.

Maybe this example CSS helps (it also opens one submenu level on hover, but requires a .htc file for IE to work, so if you want to see how it looks, use Firefox :) :

#menutree {
	position: relative;
	height: 23px;
	background-image: url(yourimagehere);
	background-repeat: repeat-x;
	margin-left: -10px;
	margin-right: -10px;
}

#menutree ul {
        margin-top:0px;
        left:-15px;
	padding-top: 3px;
	position: absolute;
	list-style: none;
	width: 1000px;
}

#menutree li {
	line-height: 16px;
	padding-left: 5px;
	padding-right: 5px;
	float: left;
	font-size: 12px;
        position:relative;
}

#menutree ul ul {
        display:none;
        left:5px;
}

#menutree ul li:hover ul {
        display:block;
}

#menutree ul li ul {
        width:120px;
}

#menutree li li {
	float: none;
	margin-left: -40px;
	padding-top: 2px;
	position: relative;
	width: 120px;
	background: #eee;
	border-left: 3px solid #f00;
}

#menutree a {
	border: 0;
}

#menutree a:hover {
	border-bottom: 1px solid black;
}

WebKat · 2007-01-25 20:36:38

“wow_menu also supports sections, but through a workaround. If the plugin finds a category and section with the same name, it will link to the section instead of the category.”

Um, this is ruining my day in a big way. Can I turn this off? I don’t ever, ever, ever, ever, ever (did I mention ever?) want it to link to sections. There are several reasons for this, including but not limited to the fact that I don’t have my site organized that way! But I had to create same-named sections to make the links to related articles at the bottom of the pages not link to completely irrelevant stuff, and thus now my menu is almost worthless because it keeps linking to sections for half of the categories, which sucks because it’s a kick ass plugin otherwise. (And due to other settings and so on, I have been unable to get my section lists to display properly without messing up other pages, so right now they only show one article, in excerpt format, which is worthless.)

Also, when using showcount, I get this behavior:
showcount=“0” – no article count (duh)
showcount=“1” – article count with the word “articles” (makes the whole thing way too wide for my nav area)
showcount=“2” – article count with the word “articles”, identical to “1”. :(

I just want [12] or whatever, I don’t want any words! Help?

Edited to add: I don’t know if it will matter at all but here is a link to my (test) site: http://test.opalcat.com

Last edited by OpalCat (2007-01-26 00:38:21)

nighthawk · 2007-01-27 14:05:56

Sure thing – check the plugin help. You just need to turn “sal” (section auto-link) off (i.e. set it to “0”).
Investigating on the “showcount = 2” problem…

Addendum:
Oops! Seems like the “=2”-option wasn’t implemented by my fellow co-writer on this plugin. Sorry for that! Will fix that now and release v1.01 asap.

Addendum:
wow_menu v1.01 released with the fix. Enjoy, and sorry for the inconvenience! :)

Last edited by nighthawk (2007-01-27 14:17:57)

WebKat · 2007-01-27 16:03:19

Heh, I feel like a tard now because I saw the “sal” option and thought it was very odd, because in my head I was reading it as an option whether or not to have the things on the menu be links or not and I didn’t see what good it would be without links. I didn’t make the mental connect of the word “Section”. Dur. Downloading new version now… thanks for a great plugin!

GeertAki · 2007-02-16 10:32:33

I installed this plugin yesterday and I like it already.
However, I have some remarks/suggestions that you may want to consider to implement:

1) On the new admin-tab, it would be very useful to have a button to automagically sort the menu by category Name (case insensitive please) or title (let the user decide). Perhaps with an option “Keep sorted at all times”, so when a new category is added, it is inserted at the correct place.

2) This is already mentioned in the known issues, but it would be nice if the URL’s follow the textpattern-settings, so clean URL’s when that option is selected on the preferences panel in textpattern, otherwise, use the messy ones.

3) Currently, the wow_menu_if_sub_of-tag does not return true if the current category is the one that you pass as “cat”
For example, when you have parent category “Internet” and 2 sub categories “email-client” and “browser” and when the current category is one of the sub categories and you pass “internet” as “cat”-attribute, it evals as true, but when “internet” is the current category, it evals as false. Perhaps, an extra attribute should be added to specify that you want it to eval then as true as well.

4) Add an option to omit the javascript-output if you don’t need it.

I really hope that you will implement these remarks asap.
However, already nicely done!

edit: remark 4 added.

Last edited by GeertAki (2007-02-16 10:43:54)

robert1 · 2007-03-23 16:31:02

Hm.
I just want show the main catgeories, and child categories only, when the parent category is choosen/active.
I’ve tried and tried…

Is this possible? And how?

Thanks so much.

nighthawk · 2007-03-24 15:29:45

Hi Robert,

I’m afraid that’s beyond the functionality scope of this plugin – you can easily achieve this by using CSS, though. The plugin automatically generates JavaScript arrays which contain the menu category names and references so you can also build a nice JavaScript application around it.

If you wait a couple of days, I can provide you with a URL to a site for which the plugin is in service – including CSS for creating the effect requested by you. The site just isn’t officially online yet.

Cheers!

nighthawk · 2007-03-24 20:02:17

Hey GeertAki,

thanks for your suggestions!

1) that’s a feature I have been pondering for a while, too, but I honestly think it’s not necessary. After you have sorted the menu items for the first time (usually after installing it and preparing the menu order), there usually is no need to sort them by name. Also an auto-sort is not really the intention of the plugin, as it takes control away from the user. So, unless there’s a strong demand for such a feature, I will not implement it.

2) Using clean URLs is neither possible nor reasonable with wow_menu – please check this post earlier on in this thread.

3) Good point! Implemented that and will release with 1.02 in a couple of minutes.

4) That’s already there – see attribute “js_arrays” :)

Thanks for your feedback!

robert1 · 2007-03-26 01:52:46

Thanks Björn.

Logoleptic · 2007-05-29 04:17:10

Thanks for the awesome plugin! It’s almost perfect for a client project I’m working on. There’s just one quirk that would make it dangerous for my client to use wow_menu’s best feature — menu re-ordering. I’m a little brain-fried after a long day, so I hope this post makes sense…

At its root, this has to do with the kind of list-hiding CSS trickery that nighthawk hinted at in post #86. Just to make sure we’re on the same page, here’s how I used CSS to hide subcategories except for within the current parent category. I’d guess this is how nighthawk did it too:

Step 1 — Apply current category or section name(s) as an id or class to the <body> element.

Step 2 — Use something like the following CSS to make sub-categories “disappear” unless you’re in their parent category (note the use of matching section & category names for the sal="1" thing):

#menutree ul ul { display: none; }

body#section #menutree ul#U1,
body.section #menutree ul#U1,
body.subcat1 #menutree ul#U1,
body.subcat2 #menutree ul#U1,
body.subcat3 #menutree ul#U1,
body.subcat4 #menutree ul#U1,
body.subcat5 #menutree ul#U1,
body.subcat6 #menutree ul#U1 { display: block; }

The problem that I’m facing is the relative inflexibility of this arrangement. This plugin assigns values to the id attributes of lists, list items, and links based on their position in the menu. If my client decides to re-order the menu later on, my CSS will break because the same id value will be given to a different list of sub-categories.

My suggestion: tie the id values to the categories themselves, rather than their position, to maintain consistency regardless of menu order. For example:

Root <ul> element gets an id of “menutree” (why is it in a containing div?) if the plugin’s start attribute isn’t used. If start is used, then the id could reflect the ID number of the category in question — “Uxx” where xx is the ID of the category specified with start.
The list items and links for category 23 get id values of “L23” and “A23”, respectively.
The list of sub-categories beneath category 23 could be <ul id="U23sub"></ul>.

You could use a similar strategy with category names instead of category IDs. For example, “U_my-category-name_sub”.

Some way of identifying menu items by what they are, instead of where they are, would help make wow_menu’s menus a lot more future-proof. What are the chances of seeing a feature like this in the plugin someday?

Oh, and… thanks for listening to me ramble. :-)

veggiegrrl · 2007-05-29 12:14:58

Has anyone used something like Suckerfish or other CSS markup to generate drop-down or fly-out menus with this plugin? If so, could you point me to it? I’d love to see some examples.

Textpattern CMS

Textpattern CMS support forum

#76 2006-10-03 13:17:28

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

#77 2006-12-23 20:06:31

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

#78 2007-01-07 16:22:31

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

#79 2007-01-22 06:05:56

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

#80 2007-01-22 09:10:09

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

#81 2007-01-25 20:36:38

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

#82 2007-01-27 14:05:56

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

#83 2007-01-27 16:03:19

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

#84 2007-02-16 10:32:33

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

#85 2007-03-23 16:31:02

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

#86 2007-03-24 15:29:45

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

#87 2007-03-24 20:02:17

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

#88 2007-03-26 01:52:46

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

#89 2007-05-29 04:17:10

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

#90 2007-05-29 12:14:58

Re: [plugin] [ORPHAN] wow_menu-Full menu control (order, hide/show items, subtree)

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