How to create menus

[leviter]

We want to develop a website with two kind of menus:

[1] a main menu, which consists of clickable images and
[2] a sub menu, which has to be automatically generated based on parent-child generation of the pages.

How can this be implemented in the website with Alfresco so that these menus are manageable and maintainable with the content management system of Alfresco?

[kvc]

This depends on whether or not a user should be able to control what is shown in either menu.

If the main menu is a set of clickable images, you may wish to have a form that allows a user (a web designer) to upload and reference via our file browser control an image, associated with an page reference (a JSP or HTML page for example), some ALT text.  This can be one compound element (a complexType) in the form, and it can be set to have 1 to n value.  The advantage of this form is that the user can change images, change ALT text, change references, change ordering, etc. all without changing code.

Any web page generated - be it static or dynamic - can use this XML to generate the main menu.  For a static site, a template can generate as an HTML fragment and all web pages can source it via a server-side include. For a dynamic site, you can have a JSP tag that implements the main menu sourcing directly from this example.

For the submenu, this can just be generated off the directory structure, whether you generate as a static HTML fragment or do so dynamic via a JSP tag.

Let me know if you have any more questions.


Kevin

[codedigger]

It is important for a web content management system to dynamically generate graphical menus by combined text with background image.  May be I'm spoiled by Typo3.  I see that Alfresco uses ImageMagick, so there is hope.  Is this capability available in Alfresco?

By the way, are there examples of public facing website driven by Alfresco that has dynamic graphic menus?

[kvc]

One example would be the main nav menu for various game titles on Activision's website, where the main menu is actually a graphic that provides a drop-down list of links to various details on a specific game title:

http://www.activision.com/index.html#home|en_US

One means of accomplishing this is to have a Web Form for generating an XML for each section of your website that is read for purposes of generating navigation menus.  That Web Form can be used to allow a biz user to not only  set what the list of links should be, their order, their titles, their ALT tags, etc., but in this case also enforce using an xs:anyURI-typed element selection of a related image asset (using a schema annotation to restrict asset selection to files of an appropriate mime-type, which is 2.2 can also be restricted via search or a top-level folder designation).


Kevin

[codedigger]

That example is very nice, but it is hard to tell what was done in Alfresco and what is done with Flash on that site.  Is there another example of a more tradition website, where the contents drives the dynamic menu?  (For example, business user creates a new category of pages, a new graphical menu item appears on the navigation.)

About the XML generated from the web form, do you mean that Alfresco would call ImagicMagick to combine the text from the XML with the menu's background image?