what's on the menu?

[circlesquare]

I know this has been discussed before, and I've read through a few threads but
not really found a solution.

My understanding is that contribute will allow a user to edit pages and create
new pages. Great. However, what about the menu on a website? I want the
customer to be able to update the menu himself, not rely on me downloading the
site and updating dwt files..... Thats basically my first point - can a user
edit whats on the menu?

Secondly, what about drop down menus (like heir or milonic) - can these be
used? Can they be updated?

I'm new to contribute, but it seems like a major flaw that a user can create a
new page, but can't add a link to that page in a site menu.... I'd love to be
proved wrong!

Thanks for your help.

[Chefpraktikant]

Contribute is an authoring system, not a content management system. That means
Contribute can not access i.e. a menu-file and insert it into many pages like
on systems that use a database.

If you want to make menus editable you can use the "repeated regions" but will
have to edit the menu on EVERY page the menu is displayed.

[circlesquare]

Thanks for posting your reply... at least thats clear...

Its a pity as we like the css/html compliance of it all...

Thanks

[Chefpraktikant]

Hi Circlesquare,

after reading a lot of postings in this forum I find you are not the only one
asking for a single menu-file to edit and embed it in many pages. Contrary to
my answer yesterday there seem to be workarounds for your problem. But all
have more or less disadvantages.

You can embed a menu-file by ServerSideInclude or by making your HTML-pages
PHP-pages with an embedded php-rule that embeds a menu-file. Nevertheless there
seem to be problems with relative or absolut referencing or with some rules the
editor has to follow which are not always easy for regular editors.

Furthermore I think that with those solutions it is not feasible to highlight
entries in the menu depending on which page is currently active. I presently do
that with those @@-expressions (don't know the term in english) so the editor
can change the highlight by editing the "template attributes" in Contribute.

Regards Jan
(sorry, my english is so bad this morning)

[Seven]

You can also use INCLUDE MENU.PHP function and edit the MENU.PHP file

[Marje]

In many cases we allow our clients to update their menus themselves. For the
menu, we create a horizontal or vertical unordered list. Each menu item is a
list item. By placing their cursor next to the last letter of the last list
item and pressing the Enter key, they can create a new menu item.

This works fine for relatively small web sites. It requires that the client go
to each page and update the menu.

For our larger clients, we download all pages, change the template then
reupload all pages. Simple, efficient, not too time-consuming for us.