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Ryan,
Again I’d like to thank you for the excellent work on this plugin, it certainly makes adding suckerfish menu’s to our blogs easier. The support you also provide is above and beyond what I’d expect, and I’m sure those who receive it are just as thankful as I. If they aren’t they should be.
After receiving some of the aforementioned support, and then reading over what some of the other people were asking (specifically the thread started by Wingless_Angel31) I started to fool around with the CSS myself, looked at your "premium CSS menu generator" demo at https://geek.hellyer.kiwi/demo/wordpress and noticed a few glitches.
First I’d suggest you go to the Holotheria page, Categories->Animals->Mammals->Theriiformes->Holotheria. Then you’ll notice what I believe are three distinct glitches. Unfortunately some of them may be WordPress glitches, but I thought I’d mention them just in case.
The first being that unlike when you’ve clicked on something under the "Home, About, Blog, or Dropdowns" the top level menu item "Categories" does not get highlighted. I believe/suspect this is because there is no standalone "Categories" root page, where as the other menus do have such a page. Strangely, though, when I attempted to implement similar code on my own site, I couldn’t get the effect to show on any of the menus ("Home" included).
The second issue,, when checking to see the path to the current page from the menus, ignoring the previous glitch, you’ll note that when you pull up the Categories drop down you’ll note that Animals isn’t highlighted, neither is Mammals on the next tier down. It’s not until Theriiformes that we see our path, and by this point we likely already know it. It only appears to highlight the parent tier. Strangely, on my own site, after figuring out the CSS, I don’t seem to have this particular problem. I suspect perhaps that the ancestor tag was a recent WordPress addition that you implemented into your plugin, but more recent then version 2.5.1 running on the test site?
The third issue, and I believe this one is a simple CSS error, is what shows up in the lower tier of the "Categories" drop-down (while on the "Holotheria" page), but might be even more visible if you instead look at the second tier of "Categories" from the "Fish" page, but is visible on any lower level tier (except if the selection is on the first tier, ie "Animals"). Notice how the little ‘>’ indicator is on all the siblings of the selected element (as well as the correct parent elements, and on pages with ancestors indicated it’s correct on them as well).
Your feedback on those issues would be appreciated, but again, I’m not entirely sure if they can be fixed from your end (especially the first glitch).
Unrelated to those issues, I thought I’d also ask if there’s be a way to possibly wrap a menu back in the unlikely event your menu’s drop down and past the side of your page (ie if you wanted to use the menu’s to get to the "Placentalia" page). It’s currently doable, but you need to start using the keyboard to move the page to the right, if the menu started to swing back to the left it might work better. Of course if you had an insane number of sub-levels even that would only last for so long, so maybe it’s not worth it. I thought I’d throw it out there, in case you had some ideas.
I also thought I’d mention that using a few foreach loops in your index.php you can cut the file size down almost 50%, and also minimize the number of areas you’d need to edit in the future with some additions. I actually made the changes on my own copy, to see if they’d work, but there’s a chance you intentionally didn’t do that. I’m sure there’s a minuscule performance loss using foreach, but I’d think that’d be about it.
Thanks for the input. The "WordPress optomisation" option in the CSS generator isn’t perfect as you have noticed. I actually intentionally implemented some of those errors into the demo recently to show a prospective customer what the problems are.
Some problems aren’t fixable (or at least not without rebuilding a decent proportion of WordPress itself), like the issues you saw with the categories dropdowns.
Others like the excessive number of >’s showing up are easily corrected. If anyone has those problems with the premium CSS generator I just fix them the old fashioned way at the moment.
I’ve stagnated the development of the current CSS generator as I’m working on a much larger project which I plan to incorporate that into in the future (watch this space). Once the new project is up and running I’ll start implementing a revised version of the current CSS generator with those bugs fixed.
I’m not in too much of a hurry to sort out those bugs as it’s easier for me to just correct them by hand at this stage.
My programming skills are minimal. My speciality is CSS, not programming, so there’s bound to be a bunch of problems with my PHP and I am sure you are correct about the ‘foreach’ issue. Would you mind me having a look at your code so I can learn from/implement it?
Thanks
” title=”Smiley” />The whole point in bringing up the code was to share it, assuming you hadn’t intentionally coded it differently. Just provide me a way to send you the modified code or whatnot and I’ll pass it along, and make a not to include comments explaining what I did.
Looking at the code actually made me realize how (comparatively) easy WordPress has made certain functions, I might actually try modifying things further, but I need to look at the Codex a bit more.
Anyway, just let me know how to get my changes to you for you to review/learn/etc.
In addition I thought I’d mention I just finished adding what I believe was the feature Wingless_Angel31 had been asking about (since I wanted it to).
Assuming the visual aspect can be corrected…it was a surprisingly easy modification.
And…that brings up the visual aspect that needs work. If you’ll pull up my site, http://www.transientmonkey.com, and go to the Writings menu you’ll see what I mean. At first you might not notice anything at all, because one of the aspects that needs work is the coloring since it currently melds into the background. If you mouse over each option, though, you should see the first two options now have a > … underneath them. The first issue to fix is getting the color to be visible, and the second is to get it to show up on the same row as the text/link. When I look at the list standalone (copy the ul into a seperate html file) it shows up just fine, it’s only in the dropdown that it seems to have issues.I figure that you being the CSS expert might be able to help iron those out, and if so, then you’ll be able to add a new and handy feature to the plugin.
Thanks for the input. I’ve emailed you via the address you registered here with. Feel free to send the modified plugin via the address I contacted you by. I’ll definitely be adding an acknowledgment to you in the next plugin release, so if you would like a link added to the acknowledgment then let me know – it will be posted in the official WordPress plugins repository as well as in the plugins readme.txt file.
How on earth did you insert the ‘>’ character in though? Did you hack the wp_list_pages function? Or is there some built in way of doing that?
I corrected the colouring by adding the following code (tested in IE6 and Firefox3):
[code:25qafi6n]#suckerfishnav li li {color:#ffffff}[/code:25qafi6n]
BTW, the reason your change didn’t appear correctly was because it is outside of the link, therefore was styled differently.
The regular menu contents are styled via #suckerfishnav li li a { … however since this was not a link, I just removed the ‘a’ which therefore styled the raw (unlinked) text.
It would be nice to avoid using extra HTML though. You may notice that the ‘>’s in the premium generator aren’t added as HTML, that is entirely controlled via CSS. It leads to nicer, more semantic code. If adding extra HTML is needed though I am happy to do that. Sometimes there isn’t a ‘pretty’ way to fix these things.
There may also be some Javascript ways to achieve these effects, but I know very little about Javascript unfortunately.
I’m working on providing comments to the sections I changed and then I’ll pass along the code.
I’ll also attempt to address the questions and comments you’ve made in the e-mail I send it in.
Should be along shortly.
I will look forward to it
” title=”Smiley” />I was aware there were likely to be a better ways of doing things, so hopefully this will be a good way to learn the ‘right’ way to program these things.
I have a much larger project I’m building at the moment so hopefully I’ll be able to implement some of your suggestions into that too as it is rapidly getting out of hand code wise (too much of it!).
wow. i’m honoured my one post could lead to all your developments. or something. whee.. how did you do it?
I’ll ask malcalevak if he minds me posting his code here. That way you can learn from it too.
I’m strapped for time at the moment, so the changes may need to be introduced at a later date.
There are a few issues with the way the changes have been implemented, but it does work. I think if I can figure out how it works I may be able to implement in it a more ‘technically correct’ way. But I’m not sure when that will be. Perhaps in a month or so if things go to plan – which they rarely do.
A new untested version of the plugin is available here … http://svn.wp-plugins.org/multi-level-n … 0%20alpha/
The only feature additions are a a couple of minor bug fixes related to certain menu items not highlighting. Most of the changes are under the hood and are related to the way the plugin was coded. I don’t recommend using this at this stage, but thought I’d post it here in case anyone is interested in the latest developments.
I also tried fixing the bug which causes this plugin to clash with other jQuery plugins (it’s only a problem when the Superfish option is chosen), but I haven’t managed to fix it yet.
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