Confused about the menu

[MJ Ray]

The need to add things to the menu explicitly often causes confusion
for other users of my website and I'm a bit confused about the menu
editor's purpose. url is relative to parent menu, so I can't easily
add link to off-site pages from the menu, so what's the benefit of
having a separate menu editor?

Maybe we should add "Appear in menu position:" number field to the
"Publishing Options" part of the staticpage editor (and any other
page-like objects) instead, with a 0 or blank entry removing the
object from the menu, then offer a way to build menu structures from
that? Does that make sense?

Please let me know what you think,
--
MJ Ray (slef), member of www.software.coop, a for-more-than-profit co-op.
Webmaster, Debian Developer, Past Koha RM, statistician, former lecturer.
In My Opinion Only: see http://mjr.towers.org.uk/email.html
Available for hire for various work http://www.software.coop/products/

[kimus]

Sorry but I didn't get the problem.

There are the MenuItems and there are the Static Pages. Static Pages
could be associated to a MenuItem (relative or not) and they do not live
without MenuItems. But a MenuItem can exist without you associating a
page (i.e: blog or another application url), can be child of a MenuItem
and there's also an option to put a absolute url (i.e:
http://www.google.com)

One site can have several Menus with structural MenuItems. What you are
saying is that you would like to structure your site with only Static
Pages urls right? So, how can you add an external url to a MenuItem? How
can you add a url to a application (i.e: Blog, Shop) that aren't Static
Pages?

Let me give you another example, you can add a MenuItem (url) that is
/about/ and have several relative Static Pages to that menu:
/about/intro/ /about/company/ etc. And you don't need to do MenuItems
for intro and company pages.

If I didn't understood your problem please describe a pratical example
of the problem to better understand your confusion or we can talk about
that in gtalk/msn.

Thanks,

kimus

[MJ Ray]

kimus wrote:
> Sorry but I didn't get the problem.

The underlying problem is that users are surprised that they have to
add each page in two places to make it accessible when browsing.
So I get emails saying things like "I've written this page and it
doesn't appear on the site" which I'd like to get less often.

> There are the MenuItems and there are the Static Pages. Static Pages
> could be associated to a MenuItem (relative or not) and they do not live
> without MenuItems. But a MenuItem can exist without you associating a
> page (i.e: blog or another application url), can be child of a MenuItem
> and there's also an option to put a absolute url (i.e:
> http://www.google.com)

Is the option to put a absolute url added since r210? The text by
the url box on my r210's admin says url should be relative.

> One site can have several Menus with structural MenuItems. What you are
> saying is that you would like to structure your site with only Static
> Pages urls right? So, how can you add an external url to a MenuItem? How
> can you add a url to a application (i.e: Blog, Shop) that aren't Static
> Pages?

Well, almost the same thing: I'd like to be able to have a menu that
is built from Static Pages. Ideally, it could build from all
page-presenting objects, but being built from only Static Pages
would be good enough for now.

> Let me give you another example, you can add a MenuItem (url) that is
> /about/ and have several relative Static Pages to that menu:
> /about/intro/ /about/company/ etc. And you don't need to do MenuItems
> for intro and company pages.

How would they be accessed? Only by being linked from the page? If
so, I think I covered that use case by having "Menu Position" set to
0 or a blank entry not create a menu entry.

Hope that clarifies,
--
MJ Ray <m...@phonecoop.coop>
Kewstoke, Somerset, England

[kimus]

On 20-09-2010 20:18, MJ Ray wrote:
> kimus wrote:
>> Sorry but I didn't get the problem.
> The underlying problem is that users are surprised that they have to
> add each page in two places to make it accessible when browsing.

Let's try a simple exercise. Let's say that Menus are the Folders and a
Page is a file, right? Can you make folders with files? :-D

But if you make pages Relative (inside) to the menu you only need 1
menu! So, a page named 'about' associated with 'Root' menu will have
automatically a '/about/' url. A page named 'some page' will
automatically have a '/some-page/' url. etc...

> So I get emails saying things like "I've written this page and it
> doesn't appear on the site" which I'd like to get less often.
>

This only happens if they didn't published the page, because you always
need to associate with a menu. So, I guess, when you are saying that it
doesn't appear online you are saying that they created a page. If so,
the page has a menu associated! :-)

>> There are the MenuItems and there are the Static Pages. Static Pages
>> could be associated to a MenuItem (relative or not) and they do not live
>> without MenuItems. But a MenuItem can exist without you associating a
>> page (i.e: blog or another application url), can be child of a MenuItem
>> and there's also an option to put a absolute url (i.e:
>> http://www.google.com)
> Is the option to put a absolute url added since r210? The text by
> the url box on my r210's admin says url should be relative.
>

I can't remember the revision number. But don't you have a Absolute
checkbox? You have to check the Absolute option and then you can put a
http://... url.

>> One site can have several Menus with structural MenuItems. What you are
>> saying is that you would like to structure your site with only Static
>> Pages urls right? So, how can you add an external url to a MenuItem? How
>> can you add a url to a application (i.e: Blog, Shop) that aren't Static
>> Pages?
> Well, almost the same thing: I'd like to be able to have a menu that
> is built from Static Pages. Ideally, it could build from all
> page-presenting objects, but being built from only Static Pages
> would be good enough for now.
>

I understand that for simple things you want that a Page become a Top
level menu. So, I guess, that the better way to do this is an option
that creates the menu automatically, that can be done easily.

>> Let me give you another example, you can add a MenuItem (url) that is
>> /about/ and have several relative Static Pages to that menu:
>> /about/intro/ /about/company/ etc. And you don't need to do MenuItems
>> for intro and company pages.
> How would they be accessed?

Depends on your template :-) You can use the templatetag that gives you
the Pages for that Menu/url. So it's up to you to use menus or only top
level Static Pages. We can talk about that in a chat! :-p

> Only by being linked from the page? If
> so, I think I covered that use case by having "Menu Position" set to
> 0 or a blank entry not create a menu entry.
>
> Hope that clarifies,

I cleared this above right? Auto creating menus...

[MJ Ray]

kimus wrote:
> On 20-09-2010 20:18, MJ Ray wrote:
> > kimus wrote:
> >> Sorry but I didn't get the problem.
> > The underlying problem is that users are surprised that they have to
> > add each page in two places to make it accessible when browsing.
>
> Let's try a simple exercise. Let's say that Menus are the Folders and a
> Page is a file, right? Can you make folders with files? :-D

No, but when viewing a folder, I can say "New file here". There seems
no comparable in blocks at the moment, is there? I feel that would be
one way to solve the underlying problem.

[...]

> > Is the option to put a absolute url added since r210? The text by
> > the url box on my r210's admin says url should be relative.
> >
> I can't remember the revision number. But don't you have a Absolute
> checkbox? You have to check the Absolute option and then you can put a
> http://... url.

No, that seems to be missing. I guess it is after r210 then.

> > Well, almost the same thing: I'd like to be able to have a menu that
> > is built from Static Pages. Ideally, it could build from all
> > page-presenting objects, but being built from only Static Pages
> > would be good enough for now.
> >
> I understand that for simple things you want that a Page become a Top
> level menu. So, I guess, that the better way to do this is an option
> that creates the menu automatically, that can be done easily.

That would work, when combined with...

[...]

> Depends on your template :-) You can use the templatetag that gives you
> the Pages for that Menu/url. So it's up to you to use menus or only top
> level Static Pages. We can talk about that in a chat! :-p

We could but you seem to have unsubscribed from me :-p I'll go look at
the templatetag sets more closely.

Thanks for answering these pesky questions!