Notes, News, and About, Version 4 BETA

Taxonomy Treemenu Version 4 is here, a month late. Shows I'm adhering to professional standards.

Version 4! What happened to Version 3?
It existed. It never progressed beyond alpha, and was never committed.

What's new?
Only one feature any user will care about,

Taxonomy Treemenu now renders menus which are auto expanding (like the navigation menu, not a custom menu).

And one which has somewhat gone backwards,

Several of the modification options have been depreciated (I think this is an improvement).

Why a BETA?
To me, BETA means internal tested, not tried in the wild.

I've had some excellent feedback from the Drupal community, and I felt those watching tt ought to have an input into how this is progressing.

What can I expect from the BETA?
I recommend you only run it in test/copy sites. To start with.

The taxonomy hook code has not changed. The menu building has not changed. So I do not expect any crash type errors - tt is pretty robust like this anyway.

The rendering is all new. If it works perfectly, then you would have to change your site presentation/CSS.

Doesn't seem like much!
True. As I play with taxonomy treemenu, the feature seems natural so is invisible.

How does this justify a new version (or two)?
Well, it's a change of mission statement, from,

Renders a taxonomy as a custom menu.

to

Generates a custom menu from a taxonomy, and renders the result as a system menu.

TT1 and TT2 were able to use stock Drupal menu rendering. Unfortunately, the functions are very catch-all, and not broken down so they can be used in parts (see menu_all_data() for an example). Neither do they include any hooks. So I had to build a parallel copy of the core menu renderers, which involved nearly 300 lines of copied and hotwired code, not to mention having to delve into the subjects of access permission, caching, and tree building. To use the new functions, we needed new loaders.

Along the way we needed to resolve conceptual issues -em how to page in no-node menus (duplicate links), how to render nodes, how to connect pre-rendered menus, URL structures, etc.

To leverage the new power on hand, tt needed a new URL structure. So the module was re-mapped into menu, which then caused a re-write of the loaders. The result needed several bugs tweaking. Which was followed by the realisation we could drop the vocab column altogether, another re-write. At which point we saw that taxonomy-router was not much good for the much reduced 'auto-menu in a block' styles, so that got re-written with some new tricks thrown in. And then we needed to revise taxonomny-menu to take advantage.

At that point, I was near a release. Then I got fed up of trying to handle multiple wildcards in URLS, as Drupal isn't good at it, probably for efficiency reasons. So I rewrote the lot with a single URL arg for the parent trail.

If you know the analogy, this one Version 4 feature is the tip of a coding iceberg.

What's next?
Hah! See if people post? Create a priority list..!

Also, I think some node ordering.

Rob.