WordPress OpenCube Menu

Posted on March 9, 2009
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OpenCube Cascading Menus in WordPress

The WordPress Menu Creator published by UltimateIDX is now fully compatible with the new OpenCube “Quick Menu 7.0″ menu system after testing just a day ago on the new GoAllPro blog site. Although the OpenCube menu system generats code that isn’t consistent with the markup of the WordPress Menu Creator, the code can be easily altered to work with the WP Menu Creator. Once the code is modified to work with the Menu Creator, blog owners can have the amazing, high quality and fully validated menus from OpenCube in their blogs.

The primary differences between the OpenCube menu and standard unordered list type menus like suckerfish and others, is that OpenCube names its tags, classes and ID’s for styling with their own naming prelims. Naturally this isn’t a problem or even a bad thing, its just that in order to make the fancy OpenCube menus work in conjunction with the WP Menu Creator, a person has only to do a global find and replace for various tags once the menu is generated. With their new, and quite honestly cleanest possible solution, OpenCube’s Quick Menu 7.0 is an entirely subscription based web interface application. Easy to navigate, easy to modify and easy to implement, the OpenCube menu works beautifully in every single project I’ve built in the past year (referring to 6.0).

Menu development software like many other developer tools is very expensive in the total scheme of things for web development. Pick any menu system available then take time to query the unlimited development or use license and then query the costs associated for use in prefab templates for distribution and what you usually get back is a price tag that can easily exceed $2,000 for a single seat license. Because of this, the number one motivating factor for UIDX in purchasing the initial commercial single seat license from OpenCube was the license permits us to build unlimited menu systems including those we distribute with templates and themes. The price, $400, the benefit, priceless. But OpenCube just made this much more affordable for developers and end users in the new release. In version 7.0 the price is a full 50% of what we paid. For developers and designers, the new OpenCube license features an annual subscription that breaks down to about $16 per month ($192 per annual) or just about 50% of the cost of previous licenses.

It is my professional opinion that the OpenCube Quick Menu system is the only tool you will ever need for generating high quality, fully validated, easy to implement menus of its type. For WordPress bloggers and site owners its the only tool I use where clean custom navigation is required. After this post I’m going to assemble a quick tutorial on how to convert your Quick Menu generated code to work with the WP Menu Creator and how best to incorporate that into your WordPress blog. But first a quick note on Menu Creator regarding cascading menus like suckerfish.

WordPress Suckerfish Cascading Menus

A quick note about the WP Menu Creator and the dozens upon dozens of emails we get regarding “What type of menus can I use” is to take these three key characteristics into consideration so you fully understand why the WP Menu Creator was built to begin with.

First: WP Menu Creator was both SEO and XHTML Standard Compliant motivated in its development

Although there are dozens upon dozens of menu hacks and modifications and snippets available for WordPress navigation, almost none of them are practical for end users to manage and or edit without some knowledge of PHP and a basic understanding of the WordPress Template Codex. This combined with the lofty demands for compliant search engine friendly requirements of modern bloggers; UIDX decided to have the tool built that would address this need.

Second: WP Menu Creator has no “practical design limitations” as far as we are concerned.

Early on in the planning stage, we had toyed with the idea of having the Menu Creator actually generate menu code, specifically menu CSS so end users could easily implement into their themes. The problem we encountered was that after having people review the menu creator, we often heard things like “its limited” to some degree. Why? Well the perception was that since we could easily include 5, 10, 15 different menu examples, the end user would perceive that it was capable of satisfying only 5, 10, 15 menu styles and be quickly discarded as a nice, but limited menu solution for WordPress. So WP Menu Creator was published without any CSS menu examples.

WP Menu Creator is actually capable of thousands of design possibilities since its only design function aside from SEO and Standardization characteristics is that it produces plain old un-ordered lists for menus. Since the vast majority of menu solutions, examples, snippets and even tools like OpenCube employ the unordered list method for menu structure, it was pretty obvious that the Menu Creator has no real limitations to the designers or developers creative efforts in building a custom menu fully manageable from within the WordPress admin panel.

Third: WP Menu Creator Distribution License

It was planned from the very beginning that we would provide code for developers to easily implement WordPress menu creator into their distributed themes either free or commercialized. In version 1.1 it is already built into this amazing navigational plug-in to have more than a half dozen new features in answer to the requests from many hundreds of end users along with code elements for menu creation. What we have done is added a set of tabs to the Menu Manager page in the WordPress admin panel that provides the end user with the three key elements of implementation of this tool into their site.

  1. Tab 1) Quick Tags for adding the menu to your theme
  2. Tab 2) Quick code snippets for adding actions and variables to your themes
  3. Tab 3) An open-source CSS Library of example menus we assembled from other open-source examples on the web. Basically its everything we could find that we were authorized to publish from other developers, modified for use in the Menu Creator. The inventory is displayed in the third tab by using a simple little RSS feed to that will always display the latest available running inventory of examples we will maintain on the UltimateIDX website.

Version 1.1 is not scheduled for release until mid March as we will also simultaneously release version 1.0 for OpenRealty 2.5+ as well.

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