SimpleMenu is a multi-purpose menu-builder for ExSite websites. It will create context-specific menus on any web page in a site. Context-specific means that the site navigation links will reflect the current location in the site.
SimpleMenu can also serve as a code template for a customized menu builder, since it contains a general purpose menu-construnction algorithm based on the ExSite page placement parameters.
SimpleMenu can build four types of menus:
When inserting a web application tag into a block of HTML, any of the above types may be provided as a parameter.
When manually coding a SimpleMenu dynamic content tag, the format is:
<!--&SimpleMenu(format)-->
where ``format'' is one of the above menu types.
SimpleMenu builds global menus for the whole website by default. That is, the ``top'' level pages displayed in the menu are those that have no parent page defined. Sub-menus show pages that have a common parent page.
SimpleMenu automatically inserts sub-menus into vertically-formatted menus if the viewer is viewing a top-level parent page that has child pages, or is viewing any of those child pages. It does descend any further into the menu hierarchy than this.
If you want to build a menu starting from one of the submenus, instead of from the top-level, then add a ``submenu'' keyword to the parameters:
<!--&SimpleMenu(vertical,submenu)-->
<!--&SimpleMenu(horizontal,submenu)-->
In these cases, the menu shows the pages that are children of the currently-viewed page. If the currently-viewed page has no children, then it shows the submenu to which the current page belongs. This is the same as the top-level menu if the viewer is currently on a top-level page.
The following CSS classes are used, and may be customized in any given site's stylesheets:
Vertically-formatted menus will attempt to inline special content objects to spice up the menu presentation:
Using these content objects, a template can incorporate custom table layouts, border graphics, and other visual tricks to lay out the menu.
You can do the same thing with horizontally-formatted menus, using content objects named SimpleMenuTopH, SimpleMenuMidH, and SimpleMenuBotH.
If the content objects noted above do not exist, then SimpleMenu will
used some simple spacer strings in their place. These are defined
in the SimpleMenu configuration file, which should be located in
cgi/conf/SimpleMenu.conf
:
|
>
<br>
Note that if you use display:block in your CSS for
menu links, the vmenu_spacer should be left blank to prevent extra
blank lines from being added to your menu layout.
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