CSSPlay, Stu Nicholls menus, a MODx non-starter?

Hi,
I considered putting this in Off-Topic, because it’s more of a philosophical statement/question. It could certainly be moved there if deemed appropriate. Anyway...

I am a CSS guy and menu geek, so naturally MODx is a very good fit. Stu Nicholls is one of the most prominent CSS experimenters out there, and his site, CSSPlay, is full of amazing demos. I used one of his menus (a drop-up!) on a job, and having his code was so helpful I made a donation to him. [Come to think of it, MODx used to ship with adaptations of Stu’s menu code, possibly stemming from when there were no "terms" - I don’t recall if Evo still includes that code.]

I recently thought it would be nice to write some blog articles showing how to implement some of his menus in MODx, complete with chunks, Wayfinder calls, and so on. I figured this would help the MODx community and give Stu some publicity and an entree into our world. I went to his site see what menus he’s doing lately, and there are some absolutely incredible ones there. Ostensibly I was looking for a megamenu, but he’s got way more than that.

So I read the fine print, and his terms are stricter than what we’re used to in open source. Now he wants a donation, and for you to ask permission to use his stuff on a live site. I picked out a particularly nice menu, and emailed Stu for permission, explaining the above, mentioning that I had donated before.

His reply was somewhat peculiar. He said that if I paid, I could use it, but that I could not offer it as a download. I guess he was shooting from the hip - it was almost a canned response. He did not address my question about the previous donation. And of course, this begs the question - anyone with an ounce of technical ability can download HTML and CSS very easily, including from his own site. So explicitly offering something as a download is almost a moot point. I have to also infer that he has no interest in promoting his material to MODx people.

I was put off by this. I know that we all have different views on whether software should be paid for, and even if I disagree, I will respect someone’s wishes. But with the mountains of easily downloadable material on his site, it almost seems silly to have terms that don’t allow download, and that require payment. It’s almost as if he changed his policy after seeing how popular his stuff was, so now he’s trying to un-ring the bell. Or maybe he knows his code is ripped off all the time, nudge nudge wink wink, but he wants to get at least a little money for it from naive honest people like me?

So I decided to move on, and can the idea. I could have simply downloaded the code and done it anyway, without giving any credit. But that’s not my style. It’s too bad, really, he has some absolutely killer menus. For sheer quantity, he’s hard to beat. But there are other excellent menus out there with no implied or explicit restrictions, and I’ll investigate making menus with them.

I’d be interested in your take on this.
Cheers, Dave

That certainly sounds like a change of heart.
I’m sure his early stuff just needed the credits left in the CSS file and a link back if you wanted to.

Here is a post about porting mega menus into MODX, although I didn’t quite understand the complexity involved. But, there are links for (what I believe is open source) mega menus. I never checked the licenses.

That sucks about the licenses. Kind of doesn’t make sense, putting all that stuff up where it seems free to download but asking for money.

Quote from: goonz at May 14, 2011, 09:30 PM

Here is a post about porting mega menus into MODX, although I didn’t quite understand the complexity involved. But, there are links for (what I believe is open source) mega menus. I never checked the licenses.

That sucks about the licenses. Kind of doesn’t make sense, putting all that stuff up where it seems free to download but asking for money.

Yes.
It seems reminiscent of the arguments about file sharing in the music industry. The old way of thinking, which I had subscribed to long ago (I’m a musician), was that you want to have your stuff locked down so you always get paid for your work. That’s all well and good, but IMO the modern reality is that you’re better off giving away at least some of your stuff, it fosters goodwill and can lead to sales anyway. It’s almost impossible to lock stuff down nowadays, so it’s nearly a moot point. The official music industry is now a joke.

btw, Did you mean to include a link there? I am actually planning an article about doing a megamenu shortly. I know there was a discussion about this some months ago where people were talking about Soh Tanaka’s masterpiece. That one is really tricky to do with Wayfinder. I cobbled together a version of it, but it was so convoluted that I didn’t want to publish. The reason is that Wayfinder gives you an inner and outer level, but really would need a third level, a sort of intermediate level. This is due to having DIV’s inside of list items and fun stuff like that. If someone were to add iterative level templates to Wayfinder, this would be a little easier.

I found another megamenu elsewhere that used a more traditional unordered list layout, so that will be the basis for it.

Yes, link is here: http://modxcms.com/forums/index.php?topic=50255.0 Sorry!

I actually never looked at that code, which I suppose is why I didn’t understand the questions of whether it could be done or not. After now having looked at it, I don’t see why it wouldn’t work, it has regular structure that WF should handle easily. Take a look at the thread, I believe it was ported into MODX.