Show current page as non-link in menu: how?

It appears that the old Dropmenu snippet is no longer included in MODx. Its place is taken by the Wayfinder snippet.

Dropmenu, according to its documentation at http://modxcms.com/snippet-dropmenu.html, had a "&selfAsLink" option that could be used to tell it that the entry for the current page should not be a link. Not only do I personally find it annoying when I follow a link and nothing happens, but also, having no link to the current page is said to be in general good web design practice:

http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20031110.html

The Ten Most Violated Homepage Design Guidelines (in 2003)

"Don’t include an active link to the homepage on the homepage."

"...Never have a link that points to the current page."

And see also http://www.useit.com/alertbox/breadcrumbs.html which repeats the same recommendation for breadcrumbs. (And the MODx Breadcrumbs snippet does it right.)

I have been unable to find a Wayfinder option that will cause it to not make the entry for the current page a link. Nor does using the "&selfAsLink" option have any effect.

And I can find no way of using CSS to change a link into a non-link. Change a color, yes. Change a link to a non-link, not that I know of.

Was the no-link-to-current-page feature eliminated when Wayfinder replaced Dropmenu?

Is there a known simple solution?

Rahul

Use a separate template without the href for the current page template.

Quote from: rthrash at Apr 10, 2007, 09:45 AM

Use a separate template without the href for the current page template.

Thank-you!

Part of my learning with MODx has been to get familiar with the terminology. Here, I needed what the Wayfinder documentation calls a template but what the MODx menus call a chunk.

Once I got past this initial hurdle, it took me only about fifteen minutes to add the chunk. For the benefit of others, here is what I did.

1. On my template (not chunk) for the web site, I changed the invocation of Wayfinder to:

[!Wayfinder?startId=`0` &level=`2` &hereTpl=`hereTpl`!]

(Note the reference to &hereTpl.)

2. On the Site->Home->Resources->Chunks tab, created a new chunk called &hereTpl with the following contents:



The effect of the above is that in the menu generated by Wayfinder, the entry for the current page will be printed as non-link text, and will belong to the "here_non_link" class.

3. To my css for the web site, added a "here_non_link" class with appropriate css settings.

Works nicely.

Rahul

P.S. I think this should be Wayfinder’s default behavior, because I cannot think of many situations when the user will prefer the entry for the current page to be a link.

Thanks crossconnect!

This, and other things that I have learnt and am learning about MODx, are now described at the MODx-based web site that I am building:

http://rahul.rahul.net/modx-hints.html

Rahul