dhtml_menu 6.x-4.x-dev

This is a backport of the pre-release 7.x-1.x-dev version to Drupal 6. The reason for the backport is that most of the changes introduced between Drupal 6 and Drupal 7 are features and UI improvements unrelated to the core API. It is therefore worthwhile to make the new features available for Drupal 6 in a fourth major release, DHTML Menu 6.x-4.x.

New features:

Most importantly, three new options have been added for handling the expansion and navigation behavior of DHTML Menu.

Nav 1: One-Way Expansion

When using the option to keep only one menu open at the same time, it rarely makes sense to collapse a menu. The far more frequent use case is to expand a menu and then visit its page.

In keeping with the new Drupal user interface philosophy, the most frequent tasks should be made easiest, so the default option is now to open the page of a menu whenever it is clicked while expanded.

Read issue: #554030

Nav 2: Bullet Icon Folders

The bullet icon can now act as an expander. If this option is selected, the "arrow" icons are replaced by "folder" icons reminiscent of the tree view of many file browsers. Clicking the icon will expand and collapse the menu as a folder; clicking the menu link opens the page.

Using carefully positioned link overlays over the actual list icons, this feature has finally been implemented in a clean and conforming way, and has been tested with right-to-left locales.

Thanks to Lullabot for their excellent GPL icon set)!

Read issue: #479260

Nav 3: Hovering

If you want to, you can now make menus expand when the mouse hovers over them.

Read issue: #300106

Custom Animation

Instead of a hard-coded speed and effect, the details of the expand/collapse animation can now be configured. Three effects (and combinations thereof) are available: Opacity, vertical and horizontal scrolling. Speeds can be varied between a very fast 1/10 seconds and slow 2 second animation.

Read issue: #273872

Blacklisting and whitelisting

Elsewhere in Drupal, if there is an option to exclude several elements from a list, you can choose whether to enable or disable by default. With this feature, DHTML Menu does the same. DHTML can be disabled on individual menus, or disabled on all but individual menus.

Read issue: #556042

Disabling the cookie

Remembering the open and closed state of menus is one of the oldest remaining artifacts of the Drupal 5 version. Several new features are incompatible with it, including the established "keep only one menu open" option. Now, the cookie can firstly be disabled, is secondly disabled by default for new installations (upgrading users keep it) and is thirdly disabled when using features that don't work well with it.

Read issue: #555500

UI Improvement

Readable menu names

On the administration settings page, the list of menus to be disabled now displays the human-readable, localized names of all menus. This also replaces the node_load() calls for book names with a book_get_books().

Read issue: #477978

String update

Most of the user and admin-facing text has been rewritten more clearly and for more consistent terminology.

Installation message

Numerous complaints come from users who were unable to find the configuration page, or did not realize there was one. To fix this, the module now mentions and links to its settings page.