Menu Maker 0.1 (alpha)

Menu Maker 0.1 alpha

short description

The Menu Maker lets you create hierarchical menus directly from your categories-tree. Hereby each menu item may be assigned to a specific level and may have it's own position on the theme. For Example: You can create a 2-level menu-structure with the main navigation horizontally aligned on top of the page and the sub-navigation vertically aligned in the sidebar.

Contact
Please reports bugs, comments or feedback to my e-mail address: dubistich@googlemail.com

Installation and Requirements

The Menu Maker was developed and until now only tested with wordpress 2.2. It requires the Automattic Widgets plugin, which is bundled together with wordpress 2.2. For Installation unzip the contents of the zip-file into the folder "yourWordpressFolder/wp-content/plugins/". Then you must activate the plugin via the wordpress administration backend: Plugins > Plugins. Click the activate link of the Menu Maker plugin.
Then goto Presentation > Widgets and place some menu maker items in your sidebar(s). Each menu maker item has to be configured. So read the following chapters.

What does it do?

This question can be answered best, with a small illustration. Assume you have the following structure of categories:

| maincat A
|	|_  subcat A.1
|	|_  subcat A.2
|		|_ subcat A.2.1
|		|_ subcat A.2.2
| maincat B
|	|_ subcat B.1
|	|_ subcat B.2
|		|_ subcat B.2.1
|		|_ subcat B.2.2

If you use the wordpress template tag 'wp_list_categories' you get a tree menu which more or less looks like this beatifull ascii illustration. Normally you would place the categories navigation in the sidebar.

But what if you need to split up the category-navigation into separate blocks and place them in random areas (the widgets plugin refers to this areas as sidebars) of your template? The template tag 'wp_list_categories' isn't sufficient for this task, at least according to my opinion. Here comes the Menu Maker in play:

It allows you to define up to 5 menu blocks which can be placed and configured using the Widgets Plugin (which can be reached in the wordpress-backend: Presentation > Widgets). The widgets are called 'Menu Maker 1-5'. In the frontend they are rendered as simple unnumbered lists. (>ul<)

Configuration

For each Manu Maker Widget, you can configure the following parameters:

menu title: the title of the menu block
root category: the starting point of the menu block
level: the descendant level from which the categories should be taken (relative to the configured root category).
always visible: if enabled, the categories of this menu block will always be displayed. No matter which category is actually selected.
css-class list: CSS Class for the unnumbered list
css-class list entry: CSS class for the list entries (categories)
css class selected list-entry: CSS class for the selected / active list entries (if left empty, the css class of the non-active list entries is used)
use category description for title: whether to use the category description as link title

Configuration-Examples

Example 1

root category = <<ROOT>>, level = 0 and always visible = checked will result in

	maincat A
	maincat B

!!! note: normally you should turn on the configuration parameter 'always visible' for your category-navigation's root level. Otherwise it may happen, that you don't get any category navigation at all, if for example a static page is currently selected.

Example 2

root category = 'maincat B' and level = 0 will result in

	subcat B.1
	subcat B.2

Example 3

root category = 'maincat B' and level = 1 will result in

	subcat B.2.1
	subcat B.2.2

!!! only if subcat B.2 is selected, otherwise the menu block will be empty

Example 4

root category = 'maincat B', level = 1 and always visible = checked will result in

	subcat B.2.1
	subcat B.2.2

no matter which category is actually selected

Example 5

root category = <<ROOT>> level = 2 and always visible = checked will result in

	subcat A.2.1
	subcat A.2.2
	subcat B.2.1
	subcat B.2.2

no matter which category is actually selected

Planned features for further releases

optionally hide special categories (uncategorized, blogroll)
make it work without widgets
set initial default values for configuration parameters
implement the options of the wp_list_categories template tag
create a demonstration page / template
utilize references to speed up runtime
make the number of instances configurable

download menu maker (zip)

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