"Non-toggling" vertical menu and menu item holders?

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9/25/2008 8:48:35 AM
Slaven Brumec
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"Non-toggling" vertical menu and menu item holders?

Greetings!

I have two questions about menus in mojoPortal:

  1. Can we display non-toggling multi-level vertical menu? To clarify, I'm interested in two- or three-level vertical menu with all items statically displayed, without need for toggling with mouse pointer to second and third level. See, for example, vertical menu on starcraft2fans.com. (I know it's silly example, but it's first I've googled).
  2. Can we display menu items, both in horizontal and vertical menu, that act only as holders for menu items (and corresponding pages) deeper in the site hierarchy? For clarification, see dotnetnuke.com and point to Programs and then Sponsorship: sponsorship menu item is just a holder for Overview and Current Sponsors, without its own corresponding page.

Best regards!

 

9/25/2008 8:58:12 AM
Joe Audette
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Re: "Non-toggling" vertical menu and menu item holders?

Hi,

1. You can use a TreeviewMenu (UseTreeView="true") and set the property TreeViewExpandDepth="100" or whatever number to expand it all the way to the level you want to show.

2. No we don't have something like that for the main menu but there are various ways of implementing that kind of thing separately from the main menu. Its not already built for you.

Best,

Joe

9/25/2008 9:18:53 AM
Joe Audette
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Re: "Non-toggling" vertical menu and menu item holders?

Just in follow up since this is the second question today where someone asked about menus like DNN. A couple of things I would like to point out.

mojoPortal is much more focused on web standards and accessibility than DotNetNuke. If you view the rendered source of the page http://www.dotnetnuke.com/ in your browser, you will notice several things:

  1. They are using table layout and their DOCTYPE is Html 4 - in  mojoPortal we use modern layout techniques and we use Xhtml and our pages generally are valid. If you copy the rendered source of that DNN home page and paste it into the W3C validator here: http://validator.w3.org/, you will find that it doesn't even validate for Html 4, it has 138 errors.
  2. We use javascript only as a way of improving existing markup. Everything should work in mojoPortal even if javascript is disabled though it may not be as fancy without the javascript. If things don't work when javascript is disabled then it doesn't pass accessibility guidelines and laws. I notice that if I disable javascript in my browser and refresh the page http://www.dotnetnuke.com/, the top menu you refer to with the placeholders dissapears from the page. This is not accessible.

Best,

Joe

9/25/2008 9:44:42 AM
Slaven Brumec
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Re: "Non-toggling" vertical menu and menu item holders?

Actually, that second menu feature I asked about is not something inherent to that lousy SOLpartmenu in DNN, but something you can get when creating new page and designate it as disabled. Then, subpages can be added which parent page is that disabled page, and then you can get effect I asked about. Anyway, lack of that particular feature is not something that worries me about mojoPortal. Just asked, so that I can prepare to talk with users.

In company where I work, we use DNN as framework for some cadastral web applications and, while it did take a lot of plumbing out of our backs a while ago when we began, it is very slow, and some features like before mentioned SOLpartmenu (or-what-be-its-name) are pure horror if you get unlucky enough to be forced to customize it.

So I decided that in one freelance project of mine I will not use DNN but mojoPortal. It's much faster, it's C#, and it's architecturally cleaner.

9/25/2008 9:55:51 AM
Joe Audette
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Re: "Non-toggling" vertical menu and menu item holders?

If the ASP.NET menu and treeview and SiteMapProvider model supported an option for disabled pages then it would be easy to implement this but they don't. I will ponder it. One possible way is if we add a property to page settings for it and then when databinding the menu if we could add an onclick="return false;" to the link of the disabled page it would disable the link. Of course if javascript is disabled then it would still navigate to the page and it would also navigate to the page if the user right clicked the link to open it in a new tab. Not a perfect solution. Maybe it would be possible to remove the link and just put text.

Best,

Joe

9/25/2008 9:59:50 AM
Joe Audette
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Re: "Non-toggling" vertical menu and menu item holders?

What I usually do for pages that are just meant for grouping is enable the "Show Child Pages Index" on the page so that if someone clicks the grouping page itself it just presents the menu for the child pages. For example the "Documentation" page on this site is just for grouping so its only content is a map of the pages beneath it.

Best,

Joe

9/25/2008 4:45:02 PM
Slaven Brumec
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Re: "Non-toggling" vertical menu and menu item holders?

Well, thanks for answers!

However, there's one more thing that I don't understand in menus, not even after looking in PageMenu.ascx.cs: what's the function of TreeViewExpandDepth property? I thought that it should force full treeview expansion on page load, without need for clicking on '+' marks. But it isn't so, at least not in jsavard-subblue skin I tested. And - is there any way to force full treeview expansion on page load?

9/26/2008 8:08:58 AM
Joe Audette
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Re: "Non-toggling" vertical menu and menu item holders?

Hi,

You are correct about what TreeViewExpandDepth should do. The reason it doesn't work in jsavard-subblue is because treeview is not being used there, its using <asp:Menu instread of <asp:TreeView

To make it use TreeView set UseTreeView="true"

But be aware that <asp:Menu is styled by stylemenu.css and <asp:TreeView is styled by styletreeview.css

So the TreeView will not be styled the same as the menu was after you change it.

Hope it helps,

Joe

ps, awesome gravatar!

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