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Using MW as a foundation for a responsive menu design

Thread began 11/18/2012 12:31 pm by MikeyT | Last modified 6/05/2015 11:45 am by Ray Borduin | 5036 views | 5 replies |

MikeyT

Using MW as a foundation for a responsive menu design

Since responsive design is all the rave these days, and becoming a household name, I decided to set out and use WA MenuWriter to create the foundation for a responsive menu. One that adapts to the desktop, tablet device, and smartphone. Its confirmed that MW does not produce a responsive menu out of the box, but with a little post-work and foundation knowledge of how media queries work, its not hard to adapt what MW creates into a responsive menu.

You can test the results of my experiment at responsive-menu.php. Just resize your browser window. For Safari users, I'd like to recommend an invaluable extension that I've started using available at resizer/. It allows you to resize your browser at predetermined sizes with the push of a button.

I've included the source files for anyone who wishes to expand on this, use it for their own project, learn from it, whatever. Let me note that I've implemented Framework Builder and the plugin concept for inserting the menu on the test page. The menu.php file inside the plugins folder can still access the MenuWriter edit mode, so you can change the menu structure to your heart's content. I've also added comments throughout each file to help illustrate what was done. Also, I just want to point out that the the files were produced in XHTML 1.0. Old habits die hard, I guess. This could project could easily be reproduced in HTML 5. I hope this experiment and the supplied files can help anyone on the forum wishing to use WA MenuWriter to build the foundation for a responsive menu.

All the best,
Mike

Attached Files
responsive-menu.zip
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StephenMartin

Mike that is great and so appreciated, but what about an html site. Do you know of any tutorials regarding html?

Thanks again. That's a huge help!

Stephen

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MikeyT

Hi Stephen,

The same concept can be easily applied to a plain html site. Just run the MenuWriter wizard on a site definition that's set up to produce standard html files and transfer the css I've included in the original post to your site.

Mike

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Rood's Media

I would still love to see WA come up with a Bootstrap framework extension and an option for an out of the box solution for RWD within MenuWriter. Most of my website projects utilize the WA MenuWriter extension and because of that I am kind of stuck on still building fixed width 960 grid system layouts.

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Cheyanne

Does this really work?

I am unconvinced by this approach to responsive menu building. Yes, for the mobile, it converts the horizontal menu to a vertical one. But what about screen sizes in between? It appears that at tablet size, for example, menu items have simply disappeared. Importantly, even if this does work, it is far too simplistic to be used as a commercial reality. I often have menus that have menu headers (as shown in this example), sub menu and sub-sub menus. I cannot see how any reasonably complex menu can be made to be responsive with the example shown.

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Ray BorduinWebAssist

A popular solution for larger menus on mobile is to hide the menu initially and display a menu icon that can be clicked to reveal it. (see the webassist site for a working example)

The large menu is too big to be shown initially in a mobile design, but full navigation is still possible with multiple sub-menus by clicking to view the menu.

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