Simplemenu Module Customizations
Making a great Drupal admin menu better
10 comments
Share our glory:
I'm a big fan of the Simplemenu module for Drupal as it's quite a time-saver when developing a site. It's really handy to have the entire admin menu right at the top of each page.
Clients also love it for it's ease of use and they don't have to navigate to "/admin" everytime they log in and want to make a change to the site. Now they can just hover over the option the want on the top navigation bar accross their browser and drill down to the specific page they want. Very handy and much quicker than manually drilling down to each page. It's been a real time-saver for me so far.
As soon as I installed Simplemenu I knew it was a module I was going to use for quite some time. That's the reason I wanted to skin it and make it look/work better for me and my clients. I also implemented it into a custom Drupal admin theme I am working on which I will release real soon. So check back for that one early next week.
My custom menu:
Although my changes are minor I would stil like to thank the author for creating such a useful module written by Ted Serbinski, aka, m3avrck. I took what he had supplied and modified the CSS, JavaScript (just a little) and added a few new images.
These changes look and work great in Safari, FireFox and IE7. It works in IE6 just fine but the top level menu background doesn't stay colored when you drill down to the sub menus. I'm sure it's an easy fix but I didn't bother researching it much since..well it's IE6. If anyone wants me to fix it then please let me know and I'll give it a shot.
So for now - if you'd like you can go ahead and download my modified version of the Simplemenu module for Drupal.
Please direct all feedback/comments/questions to me in this thread so I can update and improve it as needed.
Make people smarter:
Full Name
Jeremy Caldwell
Website
http://eternalistic.net
Email Address
jeremy@eternalistic.net
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Be sure to check out the latest from Smashing Magzine. They have a great article on CSS Specifity. Might be a review for some but still a good read.
Did you know that you can apply more than one element to a DIV or Class? This allows you to specify different styles to one class without the need for another DIV or Class on that element. Saves on code bloat as well.
Have a look at this article for a better explanation and example.
Jeremy that is a great new
Jeremy that is a great new theme!
I had plans to add in more themes for Simplemenu and would love to include this one as the default. I have some plans to update that module and lots of bug fixes very soon, been busy with Simplefeed where I will have some great news on that module next week :-)
Post to the issue queue and I look forward to your admin theme, rock!
ted
Very cool!
Thanks for stopping by and having a look at what I've done to your module. I'd love to submit what I have and let you turn it into the default style, that'd be great. I'll have to check out your Simplefeed too, haven't seen that one before.
nice work!
i like this alot. i was using nice menus, but it was too easy to unintentional override the css and render it unusable (margin + dropdown = mad frustrating).
with zen it looks perfect, but i noticed in garland (i'm on ubuntu + firefox) the childless menu nodes get what looks like a list bullet added on. check it out here:
http://www.rareformz.com/drupal/nerdliness.jpg
doesn't bother me (i just use the navigation menu as a dev tool), just figured you might want to know.
anyways, like the module and the site. keep it up.
b05q
Glad you like it - and
Glad you like it - and thanks for pointing out the bullet being added to the Garland theme. I'll get that fixed then update this post shortly.
Updated Module!
I just fixed the Simplemenu issue where the Garland theme would show a bullet list for the top level navigation. If you have downloaded this file already please do so again as I have updated the .zip with the changes.
SimpleMenu 4.0 released
Just to let everyone know, SimpleMenu 4.0 has been released: http://drupal.org/project/simplemenu
This release incorporates Jeremy's theme as "black & blue" and has a ton of other bug fixes. More details on my blog: http://tedserbinski.com/2007/11/22/simplemenu-4-0-released
Admin theme
Hey Jeremy,
I see that you mentioned working on an admin theme, and you'd have an update soon
Just wanted to point out a usability thread over groups.drupal.org that has some others talking about this work as well -- http://groups.drupal.org/node/6923#comment-20231
Hey Kent, thanks for
Hey Kent, thanks for pointing that out to me. Had no clue there would be any buzz generated by an admin theme. It's nothing fancy but seems to work well for myself and my clients. I've still got a little more tweaking to do to it before it's ready to go...been way busy with a new job and the Thanksgiving vacation with family and all.
I anticipate a release this week. The only issue which may delay it a bit more is I can't figure out how to get SimpleMenu to display on the top of the screen when viewing the site and in the navigation menu of the admin theme when in the admin area.
Here is a sneak peak: http://nerdliness.com/files/drupaladmin.jpg
can menus be set to display on left
I set the type large so I can see it.
My website has 10 items for the Administrator.
The drop-down simplemenu is wonderful, but I have to set the type too small for me to see..
If I don't, the drop-down menus for admin appear off the edge of the screen.
Is there any way to build some intelligence into simplemenu so that the drop-downs appear to the left of their parent menu... if it's in the last third of the menu items?
Margie
Not quite sure..
I'm not sure if SimpleMenu can do such a thing yet Margie. Your best bet is to add this question to the SimpleMenu project page and you should get a response there.
http://drupal.org/project/simplemenu
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