Funny how things can turn out. I have just built a "Shortcuts" module to replace the jsdomenu module which is very heavy on javascript (at least on my site). Then a colleague pointed out to me that "Nice Menus" does something very similar.

Looking at it, I can see that the two are almost identical in that they are based on the same original CSS (judging by the structure of the Nice Menus CSS at any rate). The major difference is that "Nice Menus" is based on the menu structure, whereas Shortcuts generates a menu on the basis of a vocabulary, and allows you to include nodes in the vocabulary as well.

I would be interested in any thoughts about the possibility or usefulness of merging the two, or whether it would be better to continue development along separate lines.

Comments

jakeg’s picture

jakeg commented

in my opinion doing it on menus rather than vocabularies makes a lot more sense. also, i'm sure there's a module that enables you to make a vocabulary into a menu

joel_guesclin’s picture

joel_guesclin commented

I think that there are a lot of people who use the taxonomy system to build a site structure (in terms of subjects) using a single vocabulary to define the main structure.

There's no shortage of ways to make vocabularies into menus - but not dynamic menus which allow you to go several layers deep in one slide and click, rather than three clicks and page reloads which can get very irritating IMHO.

My colleague who was playing with Nice Menus got the same effect by combining taxonomy_menu and Nice Menus, but it meant a fair bit of fiddling about.

rosenblum68’s picture

rosenblum68 commented

My site really needs the ability to do BOTH. NICE_MENUS are great, thanks for that. What would be ideal is to be able to choose a menu to be EITHER menu based OR taxonomy based .

Adrian Freed’s picture

Adrian Freed commented

My site needed menus, vocabularies, terms and books so did all of them.

druvision’s picture

druvision commented

It's better to merge the two!
Add an option to nicemenus to fetch data from vocabulary.

I like the undocumented pulldown menus in the nicemenus module - they don't seem to be available in the shortcuts module. Also, I like the name 'nicemenus' better.

helsinki’s picture

helsinki commented
Assigned: Unassigned » helsinki

First, they are indeed nice menus. Thanks for the development work.

In my site, nodes are only posted in the very bottom levels (3rd level), everything else is simply a semantic tree to navigate to the right topic folder. That means that ideally I don't want parent nodes to have links. This wasn't such a problem when I used taxonomy_context to display subterms, as it was just a flat navigational system. However, I prefer the dynamic menus for speed of access.

In that sense, if you were able to choose between either a menu-based or vocabulary-based menu, it would allow you to take full advantage of different aspects of taxonomy_context.

I would also like it if the menu could be displayed based on node-type or by specific vocabulary. That way the menu would load only on the pages in a particular vocabulary. At the moment, I don't know how to get the each topic specific menu to load only on the pages associated with a particular vocabulary. Anyhow, that may be possible with something like taxonomy/term/304/* I don't know if that captures all the subterms under term 304. Either way, a nice visual interface allowing you to choose either node-type or vocabulary would be very user-friendly.

I have a working version of nice_menus at www.wilba.org

genwolf’s picture

genwolf commented

I like both projects, but I think a merge would make sense.

I won't add anything to the debate about the value of DHTML menu's other than to echo what has been said, I also hate having to drill down to content through multiple clicks, and with someting like an administration menu this is doubly frustrating.

A merge would mean that ideally only one Javascript and one CSS file would have to be loaded for a dynamic menu system that used both Taxonomy and the Menu tree. I do use both because people have different ways of finding their way to the same location - some prefer subject area (taxonomy) som prefer content type (forum, articles, stories etc).

So ideally a merge would give you a situation where you could choose x number of menus and for each menu you can specify whether it is based on a menu tree ID (and which one) or on a Taxonomy Vocab (and again which one).

The biggest reason is of course the fact that whilst I can get Shortcuts to work in IE on windows (though even there it has some problems when you try to modify the style in ways that work on every browser except IE) a merged effort may result in a DHTML menuing system that works on the (undeservedly) Ubiquitous IE.

They are greta modules so please don't take it hard that IE is causing so many problems - it is just a POS browser that unfourtunately is so widespreead that everyone creating web software or content has to accomdate it's limitations. It is best compared to a really widespread polio outbreak that forces everyone to constrcut expensive facilities for the disabled as a result.

add1sun’s picture

add1sun commented
Status: Active » Closed (won't fix)

looks like the other module is dead in the water. closing