Smarty

[mohrt]

SmartyMenu is a tool for creating CSS driven dropdown menus. Assign your menu content, define your stylesheet, *poof*, you've got menus.

The technique deployed with SmartyMenu is based off of suckerfish dropdowns by Patrick Griffiths and Dan Webb. They are basically 100% CSS driven menus with a light javascript footprint for browsers that are not 100% CSS compatible. They can be infinitely nested in theory, although each level of nesting requires an added style definition. SmartyMenu example stylesheets handle four levels by default, and can easily be tweaked to handle more.

Getting CSS menus to work cross-platform is quite a daunting task. The stylesheets that come with SmartyMenu are fairly good at rendering across browsers, but not perfect! Please don't expect me to debug the cross-browser bugs, but OTOH please share your findings if you get things to work!

This is release 1.0, I'm hoping to get some help from the CSS gurus out there that have worked with this stuff before, hopefully we can build a library of stylesheets that look good and work good for most browsers. As the ratio of browsers of CSS compliant browsers gets higher, the need to support the b0rken ones (*cough*IE*cough*) will hopefully fade into the past.

http://www.phpinsider.com/php/code/SmartyMenu/

suckerfish homepage:

http://www.htmldog.com/articles/suckerfish/dropdowns/

Have fun, and have a happy Halloween while you're at it

[kills]

Hi monte,

i `ve got a few idears for your menu.

What about a Method which sets several Item attributes?

instead of

[php:1:e2dbb48989]
SmartyMenu::setItemText($item, 'Google News');
SmartyMenu::setItemLink($item, 'http://news.google.com/');
SmartyMenu::setItemClass($item, 'subnav');
[/php:1:e2dbb48989]

something like this?

[php:1:e2dbb48989]
// returns a item or probably append it promptly to the menu?
// style as an optional attr?
SmartyMenu::createItem( 'Google News', 'http://news.google.com/', 'subnav');
[/php:1:e2dbb48989]


What about assigning the item to the menu while init it?

instead of
[php:1:e2dbb48989]
SmartyMenu::initItem($item);
SmartyMenu::setItemText($item, 'Google');
SmartyMenu::setItemLink($item, 'http://www.google.com/');
SmartyMenu::addMenuItem($menu, $item);
[/php:1:e2dbb48989]

do it like this?

[php:1:e2dbb48989]
SmartyMenu::initItem($menu, $item);
SmartyMenu::setItemText($item, 'Google Groups');
SmartyMenu::setItemLink($item, 'http://groups.google.com/');
[/php:1:e2dbb48989]


I think the template functions should be namend in a different way:


instead of

[mohrt]

[boots]

The following are observations and opinions only, not critical comments....

I sometimes wonder about the point of the *_init functions since they merely wrap a single HTML-type include tag. So I don't use them

So I'm against passing the menu data to the init function.

As for the setItem* methods, I tend to prefer having such things structured as as single method (say setItem) that takes a parameter indicating the type [eg: SmartyMenu::setItem('Class', $item, 'subnav')] because I don't like endless amounts of function points and the associated duplicated code segments. I suppose, though, that that kind-of goes against the PHP mantra of being able to plug a specific function name into a manual search to find out what is happening. I'll probably preparing my data structures outside of the menu class and just pass in a complete array anyways

Finally, I'm wondering if a tiny bit of generalized framework is in order that would enable the various Addons to be pulled together (but only loaded on demand) so as to avoid duplication of code. Does anyone else think that is worthwhile or is it better to have each of the addons rely only on Smarty and Not-Yet-Another-Class?

[kills]

[mohrt]

SmartyMenu as been updated in CVS to include loadMenu(), saveMenu() and resetMenu() methods for storing menus in the PHP session.

[Isidor128]

[talo]

Hi,

Boots wrote:

[TGKnIght]

Awesome plugin

I was wondering what the proper way to customize the menu is?

For example, the immediate thing I saw was a need for graphical indicator showing which menu options had sub items.

My solution was to edit your menu plugin and comment out the htmlspecialchars() function on the $element['text'].

Is there a better way to do this? I would like to expand this so that I can put little graphics next to key options on the menu, for example the login/logout link should have a little lock graphic or something of that nature.

Maybe I am missing the official way, or one needs to be implemented?

Thanks as always for your awesome work,
Owen

[bob88]

Hey,

A simple question, is possible to freeze the link where we are ?

Thanks

[TGKnIght]

This is something I have been trying to figure out myself... The problem is once the menu is saved to $_SESSION, it doesn't really get reparsed, so saving the link in the menu array won't work...

I have written a function that recursively parses the menu searching for a matching link, so that I can utilize the sub-menu grouping for a list of toolbar links...

Unfortunately it's not accurate as there are occasions where I will have the same link at different locations on the menu..

I think that if the menu structure was saved in an associative array it would make it much more accessible..
_________________
Smarty site with one index.php controller file
Working with MySQL and Smarty
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Custom Smarty Javascript Debug Template

[anthony_ksw]

I can't get the menu working, I tried for so many times. I only got the plain text tho. Could anyone help me out please.

Here is my php code (sample from the demo):
<?php

define ("TEMPLATES_PATH",$full_path . "templates");
define ("TEMPLATES_C_PATH",$full_path . "templates_c");
define ("CONFIGS_PATH",$full_path . "configs");
define ("CACHE_PATH",$full_path . "cache");

session_start();
require('Smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php');
require('Smarty/libs/SmartyMenu.class.php');


$smarty =& new Smarty;

// attempt to load the menu from the session
if(($menu = (SmartyMenu::loadMenu('mymenu'))) === false) {

// initialize your menu
SmartyMenu::initMenu($menu);

// first menu item
SmartyMenu::initItem($item);
SmartyMenu::setItemText($item, 'Yahoo');
SmartyMenu::setItemLink($item, 'http://www.yahoo.com/');
SmartyMenu::addMenuItem($menu, $item);

// second menu item
SmartyMenu::initItem($item);
SmartyMenu::setItemText($item, 'Google');
SmartyMenu::setItemLink($item, 'http://www.google.com/');
SmartyMenu::addMenuItem($menu, $item);

// third menu item
SmartyMenu::initItem($item);
SmartyMenu::setItemText($item, 'Netscape');
SmartyMenu::setItemLink($item, 'http://www.netscape.com/');
SmartyMenu::addMenuItem($menu, $item);

// save the menu into the session
SmartyMenu::saveMenu('mymenu', $menu);
SmartyMenu::loadMenu();

}

$smarty->assign('menu', $menu);

$smarty->display('index.tpl');

?>

index.tpl :
<html>
<head>
{menu_init}
{menu_init css="/css/menu.css"}

</head>
<body>
Menu Test
<p>
{menu data=$menu}
</p>
</body>
</html>

I have put the files in the right directory and I just can't get the java script load up, i think.

[mohrt]

Compare your HTML output (view browser source) with the output from the demo, see if it coincides. Check the javascript console too.

[anthony_ksw]

Thanks! Got it working now. But I want to set the navigation bar to the center of the web page. can anyone help me out?

[TGKnIght]

All visual changes to your menu need to be done with CSS.

To center a menu, let's place your menu output inside a