Create Menus Panel

What’s working about the working example ... I don’t get it?

Hi,
I was thinking about to post a similar idea about a navigation manager.
The best example I can give is the one at http://shopify.com/.


You can add pages to your menu, add new menu (also the footer) and reorder your list.
The problem with ModX is that you can’t view at once what’s your menu order and you have to open all your pages to try to order it your way. With a manager like this, you won’t accidently put a link that you don’t want in your menu.

The MODx tree makes it really easy to figure out what goes in your DropMenu calls. Orange means it’s hidden from the menu snippet. Red means it’s unpublished and likewise hidden. Click the little sorting icon to switch it to menu index and the double arrow thing and you see it refresh the tree menu in Menu Index order.

The next version of course will make this much simpler to manage because it uses drag-and-drop via a bulk document manager module, but it’s not half bad today. I’d never want to force menus (ala shopify) on anyone ... goes against the MODx grain of flexibility.

Thanks rthrash, I didn’t know that the tree menu was order in Menu Index order. That will be very useful. And glad to know about the drag-and-drop.

I must agree with Ryan that the menu tree is dead easy to figure out. At work i use a commercial cms which have the same functionality as modx and the customers loves it. It is one of the largest sold cms systems in Denmark. However one of the new great features which has been introduced is the ability to create menu structure in the menu tree by simply writing an unordered list in the editor.

What i am proposing is that if Modx had the ability to right click in the menu tree and select an option called "build menu structure" and then it would trigger the current editor where you just had to write your menu structure like



and this unordered list would then be created in the menu tree.

Quote from: OpenGeek at May 24, 2006, 09:10 AM

Wizards, as I have always called them, are great product features to provide less technical interfaces to end users who don’t have the technical know-how to use all the power of a particular product feature. (...)

IMHO, Wizards are great for standardized needs but not so great when it comes to tailored website design... that’s why I chose Textpattern, then MODx rather than Wizardized system (so to speak) : what you gain in user friendliness you usually loose in degree of control over design. This being said, if the wizard doesn’t change the degree of control and flexiblity we have right now, then why not ?

Quote from: OpenGeek

The best way to get wizard interfaces is to sponsor development of such things privately. Then you can decide if you want to share this investment back with the community so everyone can benefit, the way our project team does by contributing code on a regular basis. This sharing and commoditization of product features is what the open source spirit is all-about; you don’t have to be a developer to contribute to the efforts.

I very much agree about sponsoring development. Opensource development is sustainable only to a certain extent. I had talked about this time and again, what I have in mind is having companies who contract me sponsor any MODx specific development they might need. One thing I’ll definitely try to swing though is have them release the sponsored code under the GPL. So far I did not get any contract requiring specific dev, but if I do you can count on me to have it sponsored by the customer.