Drop Down Menu – Duh
Over the last couple of days I have gotten the new theme looking about the way I would like for it to. Admittedly, there are still a couple of things to still do, but most of what I set out to accomplish has been completed at this point. Last night however, when I was finishing the second menu, that falls below the header picture, I could not for the life of me figure out how to do the drop downs for the sub categories. I was pretty sure that there was a way to do it the new Custom Menu options that came along in the WordPress 3.0 version. However, after looking for some time, I started doing some searching on the web… But before I go to far with that, a couple of quick notes on some plugins.
As maybe you noticed, I do have the tabbed widget over on the right that combines the Recent Tweets, Recent Posts, and Blogs I Read into one area of the sidebar. By doing this, I am still able to present the information to the readers that are interested in which ever part they seek, but at the same time I save some valuable web page real estate by rolling them up into a menu driven set of tabs. It was not to complex to set up once I found the right plugin to do this job, but a fair warning that finding was a bit complex. I began looking on WordPress.Org, specifically searching for tabbed widgets. There are a lot of options that I found there, but most I eliminated by looking at either the lack of documentation or especially screen shots that looked less than acceptable.
I did find one that very promising based on the above two criteria and even a couple of positive recommendations. However, after downloading and taking the time to set up the Tabbed Widget plugin, I can only assume the recommendations were from close friends – as it was very poor in its presentation and the way it worked. Back to searching and down a couple of pages I found Sidebar Tabs. After installing this one and setting up, it worked well and looked even better. It does have full options for limited CSS appearance options, which by default it set to various shades of a gray. It does have a nice feature of allowing your set CSS color scheme through if you blank out the default the settings. It is the plugin/widget that I am using here now.
Back to the duh moment with the drop down menus… I had looked off and on a couple of different times and could not figure out how to make the sub-menus for the categories. After not seeing anything, I started some searching to see how to do it, with Google first. What a pain in the behind set of search results. First, despite trying to limit my search to applicable for WordPress 3.0 and greater, about half of them had instructions for how to do it prior to that with CSS theme additions. I already knew how to do that, but avoiding modifications to the theme if there were updates was part of what I was trying to accomplish with using the Custom Menu options. And why is that so many have clear tags for WordPress 3.0 when they were instruction sets clearly written for 2.8 and prior? Those that were specifically instructions written for 3.0 still largely were using the previous methods as well.
There were also several mentions of plugins that offered some sort of custom menu options. Most of these, after doing some intense looking at those and the ones that were also found on the WordPress.org site, it appears that most are aimed at the sidebars, a few even set up for widgets. The ones that are menus for the header do the old style of menus with just some window dressing for making it generally easy for a non-coder to set up. At this point, I was becoming very frustrated with the lack of information. Then an ah-ha from my duh evening.
A quick lookup of the information for the actual Custom Menus when they were actually announced by the WordPress team last year and WHAM! I was so obtuse. You put the menu items into the menu, and then, instead of looking for a box to say what was the child/parent, you drag and drop in the menu screen. It even allows multiple indents for multiple layers. And after reading it, I feeling so duh. I actually recall having done that back during the late beta/RC version of the release to see how it was all working. Very past the duh now though and thankful for that.
** – Image from wpthemesplanet.com.
