Feature Proposal: Define a horizontal menu with alt and title tags using a bulleted list

Motivation

I do translate substantial documents to wiki pages. Horizontal menus improve navigation. But many entries destroy the layout. This plugin addition addresses that.

Description and Documentation

I want to render this:

• One
• Two
• Three

As (note the use of the title tag: hover over the number) :

1 | 2 | 3

This is useful when you split a large document up over a dozen chapters. The horizontal menu allows easy navigation between chapters.

This can not be achieved with a div and styles, because the title (and in IE the alt) tag need to be inserted. This type of menu can fit the whole alphabet on a line. Frequent visitors to the page often remember what the numbers mean. And infrequent visitors get help through the title tag.

SvenDowideit suggested (see Support) I consider the RenderListPlugin.

I think it is easily done by extending the plugin. Here is what I propose:

RenderListPlugin does all the setup work and then:

93    if( $type eq "tree" || $type eq "icon" ) {
94        return $thePre . renderIconList( $type, $params, $focus, $depth, $theList );
95    } else {
96        return "$thePre$theList";
97    }

And I believe this can be easily extended with the wanted functionality at line 95 by:

} elsif ( $type eq "horizontal") { 
   return $thePre . renderHorizontalList( $type, $params, $focus, $depth, $theList );

Examples

Instead of this:

Temporary Stuff | Bram's Home | Pictures Page | Cancer Journey | Letters from Palestine April/May 2004 | Things that Make Me Think | Letters to the Editor | Letters to Politicians | Muna Projects

I would get this (hover the mouse over the number):

1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8

Impact

I think this will be a relatively harmless, isolated change to RenderListPlugin

WhatDoesItAffect:

%WHATDOESITAFFECT%

edit

Implementation

I have attached an implementation that meets my needs.

You can see it in action at:

http://211.27.61.7:8080/cgi-bin/foswiki/view/System/RenderListPlugin

The examples included on the RenderListPlugin page use a vertical bar (|) as the separator. That's fine for now. I thought I would be able to use %S%, but that does not get expanded. I am puzzled by that.

I noticed that renderIconList does the expansion itself. Why is that necessary. It appears odd.

Any comments on what I did are welcome.

-- Contributors: BramVanOosterhout - 03 Feb 2009

Discussion

Very nice, I like it. You should get SVN access and update the Plugin there accordingly. I guess you did test that your enhancement doesn't break anything, right? Great enhancement Bram, thanks!

-- FranzJosefGigler - 14 Feb 2009

I agree Bram, please - become 'oneofus' I'm sorry that i didn't give your proposal the attention i intended - I recon you need to add docco for the new format types, and example but thats about it

-- SvenDowideit - 14 Feb 2009

RenderListPlugin is one of the distributed extensions, so we apply a bit more scrutiny here.

The proposal title "Define a horizontal menu with alt and title tags using a bulleted list" assumes (to me) that the plugin would style a bullet list to have the horizontal menu layout as we have on the site. It appears you doing this with separators. I would expect to have both use cases.

I also assume that with type value 'horizontal' you will still pass separator or format parameters?

Note that I don't see any label appear on FF mac, so this needs more attention to cater all users.

-- ArthurClemens - 14 Feb 2009

Thanks for the feedback all. I hoped that taking the initiative would get a response

Franz, Sven. I am in the process of setting up a dev site following the instructions at ExtensionDeveloperGuide. Being no more than an amateur, it will take me some time coming to grips with it. I started with installing svn!

The extract at Fetching a minimum working Foswiki code base worked perfectly. pseudoinstall seemed to do what it was supposed to do. But a working installation it does not give. No apache config. And working on that I find that it is different from the normal one. Need to allow symlinks! I am now trying to get the security to work. But when all that is sorted, I will get back to the plugin.

Arthur, I share your concern and am not asking to include my mod in the distributed extensions.

The only place where I noticed a horizontal menu on the site is on WikiUsers. And there it is quite sensibly implemented as a list of wiki links.

My proposal would create that same list as follows:

   * Set H_ALPHA_THEME = plain, , A
%RENDERLIST{ "h_alpha" }%
   * [[#A][Users starting with A]]
   * [[#B][Users starting with B]]
     ...
   * [[#Z][Users starting with Z]]

... except that you wouldn't, because there is no value added by adding the text.

I am puzzled by the comment don't see any label appear on FF mac,. Both alt and title label are inserted in the rendered page:

[[#Anchor][one]]
becomes:
<a href="#Anchor" alt="one" title="one">1</a> |

Leading to this result: 1 |

I am using FF on debian Linux and IE6 on windows XP. This fragment works in both. I will have access to a Mac in two weeks time. I'll try it out then.

Thanks again for your feedback. I'll attempt to become "one of yours" when I have got the svn setup under control.

-- BramVanOosterhout - 14 Feb 2009

Something must have been breaking up - now Firefox renders the labels fine.

-- ArthurClemens - 15 Feb 2009

For a broader view see: RenderListPluginDev

-- BramVanOosterhout - 09 Mar 2009