aaskee's sandbox: Likno JavaScript/CSS Menus

The "Likno JavaScript/CSS Menus" module implements a way to create stylish menus for any Drupal site. Apart from including the already known philosophy of modifying the appearance of any Drupal menu by just selecting the menu parent and applying a new style, as implemented in the "Nice Menus" or the "Superfish" module, this module introduces a different way to create and manage the content of a menu.

The content of a Drupal site consist of Pages and Stories, and the very powerful concept of Taxonomies. The "Likno JavaScript/CSS Menus" module takes advantage of the above and allows the user to create a menu that will contain all or some of these very important elements of his Drupal site. The user can now choose to include content from his website into a menu based on the type of such content. Pages, Stories and Taxonomies can all be included in a menu, either as Main Menu items or as submenus of specific Main Menu items, which enables the user of a Drupal website to easily navigate through the most important (or all) Pages, Stories, or different Taxonomies that each Page/Story has been categorized/tagged with. Of course the hierarchy of these elements within the Drupal website has been retained in the menu. Another powerful feature of the module is that it allows for each taxonomy term to include the X last posts that were tagged under the specific category (in the examples you can find a menu that contains a "Home" button leading to the home page, all the Pages of the site as main menu items, all the Stories as a submenu under a main item called "Stories" and all the Taxonomies as a submenu under a main item called "Taxonomies". Each Taxonomy item has as submenu items up to the 5 latest posts of this category).

The module was started as a project in order to allow the users of Likno Software's popular "AllWebMenus" application (http://www.likno.com/allwebmenusinfo.html) to embed menus created by the application into their Drupal sites. The user can easily specify the content of the menu and use the application to provide the style (theme) to the menu along with many navigational features. At a later point though, the development team recognized the originality of the module's selection of content for the menus and decided to enhance it so as all Drupal users could take advantage of it. We decided to use the “Superfish” (the jQuery menu plugin by Joel Birch - http://users.tpg.com.au/j_birch/plugins/superfish/) for its simplicity in its code and its interaction with the rest of the code, and of course the features it provides. At that point we tried the Superfish module for Drupal (http://drupal.org/project/superfish), which seemed to satisfy all our needs. The different approach in the selection of the content of the menu made a collaboration to seem harder than the modification of the Superfish module's code so as to fit our module's functionality.

We therefore present this new module in order to introduce this new philosophy of content selection to the Drupal users for their menus. This module will help not only the users of the AllWebMenus application (that was originally intended for), but all Drupal users, as they will be able to add creative, stylish menus on their Drupal websites, that will provide the most helpful content for users navigating in their Drupal websites.

Simple examples of the result of the module can be seen under these links:
http://www.likno.com/addins/drupal-menu-example-superfish.html
http://www.likno.com/addins/drupal-menu-example-float.html
http://www.likno.com/addins/drupal-menu-example-pos.html

Screenshots of the admin page and the block settings can be found here:
http://www.likno.com/Images/drupal-scnsht/admin-gmsc.jpg
http://www.likno.com/Images/drupal-scnsht/admin-init.jpg
http://www.likno.com/Images/drupal-scnsht/admin-menu1-opt.jpg
http://www.likno.com/Images/drupal-scnsht/block-menu1-opt.jpg