Disclaimer: this project is quite old and it may have problems on modern configurations. For example it wasn't tested at all on PHP5.
A new menu system is usually developed for each site. But it's clearly smarter to develop only one, flexible enough to accommodate many configurations. Using menus is commonplace, providing an independant fully-featured library for this task is the goal of this project.
- Written in XHTML1/CSS
- a descriptive configuration file
- ability to detect its location (but it can be overridden)
- accessible
Wmenu can be installed server-wide or for a particular site.
- To install, copy the files
utils.inc.phpandwmenu.class.inc.php, and alsoempty.inc.phpif needed, to your project's include directory. This directory must be in PHP's variableinclude_path, which can be modified in an.htaccessas follows :
php_value include_path "include directory:/usr/share/pear:."
- Copy both
stylemenu.cssandstyleie.cssin the main directory where your other style files are located, and import the first one in your main style file, whose name must bestyle.css:
@import url(stylemenu.css);- Finally, you can copy the file
empty.phpto your site's root directory, if you have to use it.
Instead of installing the menu once per site, you can do a server-wide install
in a common directory, with the include_path variable set as follows :
php_value include_path "specific include directory:general include directory:/usr/share/pear:."
Moreover, CSS files could be linked to a common CSS from a common directory; this makes updates easier.
WMenu is configured using a single file: menuconf.inc.php. This file must be
in one of include_path's include directories.
This file defines a PHP class, for example SiteConfiguration. This class
contains four variables :
-
$base_urldefines the site URL's base directory -
$site_titledefines the site's name, which will be displayed in the header -
$textsis an associative array, and defines some displayed strings. As of now, there are only two keys :main: title of the link to the main contentmenu: title of the link to the menu
-
$menuis a tree, done using arrays, and defines the menu itself.- Each key is an item's title, and the depth defines the current item's depth in the menu. Each title belongs to a 2-element array: the first one is a "page", the second one is another "node".
- An element "page" is either a string defining an HTML link, or an array containing several elements "page". If it's an array, then the generated link will point to its first element, but each of these "pages" will highlight this item.
- An element "node" is like another tree.
- A HTML link can be relative to the current page, or absolute. It can be prefixed by 1 or several special characters (see below).
-
Special characters :
!: open a new window+: emphasize@: a click on this item will do nothing
-
If the link ("page") is an empty string, then :
- if it's a submenu, it will go to the empty.php page, so as to open the submenu.
- if it's a leaf item, it will do nothing (exactly like the special characters @).
You can look at the example file (in French) if I wasn't clear enough.
Each PHP script should begin like that :
<?php
require_once ("wmenu.class.inc.php");
require_once ("menuconf.inc.php");
$menu = new WMenu (new SiteConfiguration);
$menu->calculate();
?>The library will internally generate the HTML menu.
Then, the method header() returns the page's header :
<?php
print $menu->header();
?>Similarly, the methode footer() returns the page's footer :
WMenu's behaviour can be changed in two ways.
- Highlighting a specific menu item. Doing this is as simple as calling the method setMenuType before calculate :
<?php
$menu = new WMenu (new SiteConfiguration);
$menu->setMenuType(MENU_TYPE_TITLE, 'Title');
$menu->calculate();
?>The constant MENU_TYPE_TITLE defines a calcul by title, whereas the default
constant MENU_TYPE_URL calculates using the page's URL.
-
Displaying the menu in the page's header, instead of its footer. It is defined in
menuconfig.inc.php, using the variable$menu_place. By default, the menu will appear in the footer, which is friendlier for text-based browsers, since the content will be displayed first.The possible constants are :
'footer'(by default) to show in the footer ;'header'to show in the header ;'none'to not show it at all.
Since the menu is using valid XHTML, the whole look is defined in the CSS
file stylemenu.css (and also in styleie.css, for the styles specific to
Internet Explorer). Therefore, it's easy to match your site's look and feel,
simply by modifying this file.
If you want to change the class behaviour, it's possible to directly modify
the methods header() and footer(). It's also possible to extend the class
WMenu, since we're using object-oriented PHP :-)
Moreover, the object passed to WMenu's constructor isn't necessarily static. It can be dynamically built, which is useful for large sites with several sections, each with its own particular menu.