dynamic menus
There is another extension from Felix1, called FX outlining dyna menu.
mxodmen.asp
It even supports Ajax and it comes along with a sample mysql database. It works as it should, but not always:
It gets easily stuck as soon as you use your own stylesheets.
I "almost cut my hair" in trying to get it done, although it is well built. It creates its own recordsets.
But each little change takes ages to correct, because it always sends the .js file, opener images etc again and again to the testing server.
So it has some severe flaws.
That is why I bought WebAssists Menu Writer2 and was a bit disappointed that dynamic menus were not their main approach to this.
Because most pages are dynamic. Why not menus?
This is really important to me, much more than bubbly, colorful layouts, actually I miss those clean, classic, "text - only" ones.
But Webassist's extensions look professional to me. Please don't underestimate the dynamic issue.
I should say what I am missing:
I always get this:
"Parse error: syntax error, unexpected ')', expecting T_STRING or T_VARIABLE or '$' in .../CSSMenuWriter/cssmw/menu.php on line 61"
There is always an empty
if (isset()) {
$MenuWriterL2_menuwriter_categoriesv = (get_magic_quotes_gpc()) ? : addslashes();
}
in this line
and I can't figure out which variable should be set there.
There is no easy way to add more than one URL parameter and more than one sort option. I have a sorter field in my table but sometimes this is not set and then it should be alpahbetical
For my collegue poster this would be my suggestion for a dynamic table in mysql5:
CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS `categories` (
`categories_id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
`categories_name` varchar(64) collate utf8_unicode_ci default NULL,
`parent_id` int(11) NOT NULL default '0',
`sort_order` int(5) default NULL,
PRIMARY KEY (`categories_id`)
) ENGINE=MyISAM DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci AUTO_INCREMENT=1;
The trick is the pair of id and parent.
In this example you just use one table:
The first level has a parent level of 0.
This is the top level.
If you had 5 items there would be (automatic generated) ids from 1 to 5.
Lets say:
Cars(id=1), Bycicles(id=2), Tanks(id=3), Aeroplanes(id=4), Rollerskates(id=5)
For the next level these id's would be put into the parent fields and so forth. All items of the next level with parent_id 1 would belong to Cars then and so on. Each follow-up level behaves the same way.
Hope that helps.