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Published on Friday, 01 April 2005 00:00
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Written by MamboHut
Page 6 of 9
Building
a Menu
Now that we have built some structured content, we need to provide our
end users with a way of accessing the information they want. To access your
content, the user will need to be given a menu of options to choose from. A menu can
be thought of as a collection of buttons that lead your website visitors to
your content items.
In Mambo, you can have more than one menu, but for the purposes of this
quick start tutorial, we will concentrate on the main menu, which is where you will most
likely want to provide most of your menu items. The way in which the menu is
displayed is determined by the template and/or the module related to the menu –
at its simplest, this could just be a series of text links that lead to your
content; a more complex arrangement could allow for multiple cascading menus
and sub-menus (although this would require the template designer to use a
‘client-side’ programming language such as javascript).
The simplest (but somewhat restrictive) way to add a link to an item,
is to use the final tab in the dialog box on the item editor.
Figure
15 – Item Editor: Link to Menu Tab
An alternative (and more flexible) way of adding menu options is to use
the menu manager,
by selecting ‘Main Menu’ from the ‘Menu’ menu (if that makes sense!) See figure
16.
Figure
16 – Accessing the Main Menu Manager
This takes you to the menu manager for the main menu, which looks and behaves very
similarly to the section and category managers, as you can see in figure 17.
Figure
17 – The Menu Manager for the Main Menu
When you select to add a menu item, you are taken to the menu editor, which
can be a little confusing because there are so many options. The most
important ones are highlighted in figure 18.
Figure
18 – Adding a Menu Item: Step 1
When you click on ‘Next’ or on one of the links, you will be presented
with another screen which allows you to specify additional information such as
the name of the menu, which content item to link to, and whether to open the
linked content in a new window or not. The exact options presented will depend
on which type of menu you selected in the first step, but figure 19 shows what
you will get if you choose to link directly to a content item.
Figure
19 – Adding a Menu Item: Step 2
The ‘Parent Item’ dropdown box lists all of your existing menu items,
and allows you to specify one as the ‘parent’ of this menu item. This is only
of use to you if your template includes a hierarchical menu system – this
usually involves using a script, and may not be supported in some free Mambo
templates. The effect is that you can have sub-menus appear when the end user
hovers over or clicks on the ‘parent’ menu item.
Now, when you preview
your website, you will see your new menu option which will take
you to the content you specified. See figure 20.
Figure
20 – Previewing Your Website
This should give you enough information to begin working with Mambo.
There are many more features and options that are beyond the scope of this
quick start guide. Please see the official documentation on the Mambo help
website: http://help.mamboserver.com
for more information.
If you have any feedback or constructive criticism about this tutorial,
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