best ideas for site wide menu navigation

Have an existing static site, about 350 pages. Been looking at modx. Want to update it with a user friendly menu which is a combination of one similar to officemax.com (alphabetic) and amazon (with large flyouts). The main reason is I have a lot of categories on my website.
Have been looking everywhere online for examples on how to do these large flyouts where many links can be in each window.
Any coding examples/templates out there?
Would find an alphabetic index attractive (like officemax.com) if there was a way to easily associate tags and where they could be maintained without a big hassle.

Also, need to have where navigation links can be updated from one file instead of having to change every page. For this portion, have read where php and ssi is the way to go. What’s the best (most efficient) ways to do this with modx without being a load on my server?

Hey and welcome to the forums.

For something like amazon, you could use Wayfinder in conjunction with MODx. Look into some of the examples at http://www.muddydogpaws.com/development/wayfinder/examples.html

For the officemax example you could use Ditto.

A tagged blogging example can be found at http://wiki.modxcms.com/index.php/Tagged_blogging_with_Ditto

More help with Ditto can be found at http://ditto.modxcms.com/ and you may find Basic filtering useful too (http://ditto.modxcms.com/tutorials/basic_filtering.html)

The amazon example would be a lot easier to implement in my opinion, but I like the officemax idea, and if you do indeed have a lot of tags...it may be the better choice.

Updating the links should occur automatically when you add pages (if you are using ditto or wayfinder). I’m not sure what the ssi has to do with it though.

Hope that gets you started.
Taff

Thanks! Yes, I do have LOTS of tags. I need to do some reading on those useful tools. I have been delaying starting to use modx due to waiting for the next version to come out.

Also need to have a lot of categories for my menu on web pages and where I just have to update one page and it updates all the pages that the menu is on.
Had found some other alternatives as well, such as php navigation -
http://www.tutorialfx.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=8239
Have read where a menu script could be done as well, driven by mysql, and use a freeware such as ypSlideOutMenus and grab the full url and name fields from a database and echo them to the menu.
It sounds like using Wayfinder and Ditto would be an easier route though..
Might try using ypSlideOutMenus instead of the other css, as there are no credits needed to keep in the coding.

I think you are getting a little mixed up.

Wayfinder and Ditto are already part of the MODx framework. They will both update their output automatically (if they aren’t cached), depending on the documents you have available.

PHP navigation looks to me like a navigation to base building your own simple CMS off.

I wouldn’t worry about putting a few credits into a CSS file though. I normally drop people offering free stuff a link showing them how I have adapted what they started, or make a small donation if its a paid job and saved me time.

I would suggest installing the 0.9.6 version for the time being to get to grips with MODx. You could install XAMPP or something similar and have MODx (with the demo content) installed too, in less than 10 minutes.

Feel free to holler if you have any questions, the community are extremely helpful...and we even have people in the forum with Question and Answer for example who have gone one step further and been recruited to help push MODx even further by joining the dev team.

Good luck with the rest of your project.

Taff