DropMenu Question (I think)

Got a question... I’m setting up a site for friend who’s running for a seat on the county school board. On the left-hand nav, he wants the following links:

Welcome
Issue #1
Issue #2
Latest News
Donate
Volunteer
Contact
About

This is not the exact wording the links will have, but you get the picture Now, the problem is that the pages for Issue #1 and Issue #2 are at the root level of the doc tree right now because I’m using a DropMenu snippet to create the links from the pages that are at the root level. However, I also want to use a NewListing snippet on the front page to show summaries of each of the issues with links to their respective pages. In order for this to work, I think I need to have the "issue" pages in their own folder so that they are the only ones that get posted as items on the front page. But if I do that, then they won’t show as top level items in my DropMenu. What do I do?

Is it possible to create some sort of link object so that the "issue" pages can be in their own folder, but the links to them would be at the root level and, therefore, show up at the right level in my DropMenu?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks.

Hi ddecjc,

I think I understand the problem ... (but, then again, I may not )

You could have your ’issues’ pages in a folder and then use a weblink document to allow them to display in the main navigation.

My questions are: How many issues are you expecting to get? My idea relies on weblinks being manually created so could get cumbersome for more than a few documents. If you expect to get a lot of issues, is it really a good idea to display them all in the left navigation? (The navigation could get quite big for more than a few items)

If you mean that you want a issue heading and items to be listed under each issue, then you can use the DropMenu and Newslisting to do that easy enough.

Hope that helps, Garry

I would agree with garryn here. Put your "issues" in a separate unpublished folder, and use a separate call to DropMenu with that folder as the startDoc. You can even use CSS to make any division between the two menus unnoticeable, especially with the judicious use of a div container or two.

Then you can have all the issues you like; if there get to be too many and it starts looking ugly, publish their parent folder so the main DropMenu will display it, and the long list of issues becomes a submenu of the Issues menu item, to be displayed on hover and/or when going to the Issues page as a .here class. It would only take a couple of lines of CSS, publishing the Issues parent folder and then removing the extra DropMenu call.

It would also be nice to have the summaries of the three or four latest issues posted in a sideblock via NewsLising.

Thanks for the suggestions. I’ve been playing around with it some, but haven’t quite settled on an approach yet. The easiest thing I’ve found is putting the "issues" pages in another folder and creating weblinks to those pages at the main level. The problem I’m having with that, however, is that, unlike the rest of the links in the DropMenu, the weblinks never get displayed with the "here" class because the user never actually stays on those pages.

Anyone know a way to change that? Or alternatively, is it possible to set up the DropMenu so that it shows the pages within a sub-folder without showing the folder name?

I could always modify the DropMenu snippet to do exactly what I want, but I’m trying to avoid creating non-standard stuff if I can.

Thanks.

Quote from: sottwell at Mar 18, 2006, 11:56 PM

I would agree with garryn here. Put your "issues" in a separate unpublished folder, and use a separate call to DropMenu with that folder as the startDoc. You can even use CSS to make any division between the two menus unnoticeable, especially with the judicious use of a div container or two.

I would love to be able to do this, but I need the links to the "issue" pages to be the 2nd and 3rd links in the overall menu listing. They need to be after the "Welcome" link but before the other links. I guess I could make it so that the "Welcome" page was the only one at the root level and put the issue pages in a folder and all the other pages in another folder and use 3 DropMenus. Kind of kludgy, but it should work.

Any better ideas?

Well, I ended up doing taking the approach of putting all pages except "Welcome" in one of two folders: Issues and Other. Now I use three DropMenus (one for "Welcome," one for the "Issues" pages, and one for the "Other" pages. This lets me show them all in the correct ofder and avoid the use of weblinks.