Wordpress CSS Drop-Down Menu

Posted on October 9, 2008
Filed Under Products in Review, Real Estate News |

CSS Cascading Menus for WordPress

Although WordPress is a blog (journal) solution with a lofty inventory of features, more and more designers and developers are starting to employ WordPress as a micro CMS solution. CMS solutions like Joomla and Drupal (pronounced Dru-Paul) for instance are very robust and capable enough to easily handle large corporate level websites but is essentially overkill for the average website. The main advantage in using a CMS solution is the ability to manage the interface and individual content elements without the need to alter the core structure or template of the site. One particular CMS feature lacking in a WordPress blog is the ability to effectively manage navigation elements, the ordering and the structure of the links.

For the most part menu links are generated in WordPress dynamically each time a page or post is published usually in the default ordering according to post date. Menu management in WordPress is certainly possible for a skilled coder who can understand and manipulate WordPress template tags as I had demonstrated on the Las Vegas Real Estate blog in a previous post. But this technique is not easily applied for novice site designers and rarely an option for the end user without a lot of trial and error. The solution many seek is to use the drop in code snippets from WordPress’s own codex library which can provide a quasi solution to provide reasonably easy to manage menus. Most of the time the technique employed is to use the built in feature for category links where the sort order is known before the links are added.

What if there was a solution that could provide full menu management for WordPress? Maybe one that would include link ordering, link names and even link destination more like a CMS solution? Would WordPress developers and designers be more inclined to take advantage of WordPress features they have come to love and apply it to their CMS projects? I would boldly venture to say yes.

WordPress CSS suckerfish drop down menu

The Brokers Edge faced the same frustration with menu management on sites requiring CMS features but none so lofty as to suggest a solution like Joomla or Drupal. So, we put our heads together and came up with what we believed would be the best possible all round menu management solution called WP Menu Creator During our initial planning, the developers at The Brokers Edge kept in mind that the menus it would generate need to be as SEO friendly as they can be and must not have any real significant limitations in the structure and layout of the menu once it renders. We all essentially agreed that the menu structure should follow the XHTML / CSS standard unordered list method for producing link lists. This would provide endless possibilities for styling the aesthetic appearance of menus.

What the plugin does is quite simple on the surface. It simply provides an administrators interface for blog owners to manage their menus and links in an easy to understand format. Then by simple inclusion of a template tag into the sidebar or other areas of the template files, it renders the menu in that location. The output is plain old unordered lists which can even include nested lists if you require a suckerfish type cascading drop down multi level menu. Unique CSS ID and Class Selectors are added to the menu for endless styling options and control. Although the CSS and XHTML part of the menu can be complex for some users, it is none the less easily adapted for most navigation structures on many popular themes. To find out more about this FREE WordPress Plugin please feel free to visit The Brokers Edge

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