dynamic (DHTML) menu on thebeijinger.com - how did they do it?

Posted by blue92877 on June 7, 2009 at 3:10pm

If you click here:

http://www.thebeijinger.com/classifieds

You'll see that thebeijinger.com has a pretty nice dynamic menu that represents their classifieds categories. I'd like to replicate that. But my question is, how did they do it?

I can see this being a solution: 1) using views, create a page view for each category 2) creating a new menu and assigning that view page path to each menu element 3) installing DHTML Menu module to handle the expanding contracting.

But, this seems overly tedious and a lot of work when categories need to be modified, added, deleted.

Any thoughts?

Also, I'm really interested in understanding how they have an rss feed for each category. That's fantastic - how did they add that?

Thanks!
Blue

Comments

The behavior suggests it is

Posted by nevets on June 7, 2009 at 4:11pm

The behavior suggests it is a taxonomy based menu, parent items are taxonomy terms, child items are node titles. There are several modules that implement such menus.

Menus with taxonomy terms and nodes

Posted by matkeane on June 11, 2009 at 5:45pm

Hi,

Are there really several modules that do this? Finding a solution for menus which show vocabulary terms and the associated nodes has become something of a holy grail for me recently. The closest I've got is Taxonomy Menu combined with NAT, but this still has some problems. The other modules I've looked at either turn out to display terms only, or have performance problems - If I've overlooked some, I'd love to know!

You don't need to create a

Posted by coreyp_1 on June 7, 2009 at 6:57pm

You don't need to create a page view for each category, you create one page view, and set up an argument that pulls the taxonomy term from the URL.

As an example, look at the default View that ships with Drupal. It is meant to override the default Taxonomy listings. It has a path of "taxonomy/term/%". It will give you an idea of how it works.

-Corey

- Corey
http://www.thefreecollege.com

any thoughts on the rss and count features?

Posted by blue92877 on June 10, 2009 at 12:12pm

Thanks for the responses guys, it helped, and you're right, Taxonomy Menu module works for creating the menu structure. Any thoughts on how they applied the rss to each individual menu item? as well as the count to the right of the item? (although, that last part is not so important)

Taxonomy menu has a count

Posted by cburschka on June 11, 2009 at 8:12pm

Taxonomy menu has a node count as far as I'm aware. You need to enable it though.

Not DHTML Menu

Posted by cburschka on June 11, 2009 at 8:11pm

Not sure why, but while the UI matches that of DHTML Menu, both the HTML and JS code appear entirely different and either a custom job or from a different project. You would be able to get basically the same functionality using DHTML Menu, however.