Simplemenu Settings

Menu Settings

Theme

Select a theme to display your Simplemenu items and dropdowns. The default is called original.

The themes reside in the module sub-folder named themes. Each theme is defined in a specific directory named after the theme. That name is what appears in the dropdown in the settings.

It is possible to add new themes as required. You may want to start by copying an existing theme and tweaking it.

Hide when empty

This check box indicates whether the menu should be hidden when empty. By default, you get a message saying that the menu is empty.

Note that should never happen with the default navigation menu, although if you allow all users to see the menu, anonymous users may not have access to any menu items, rendering it empty, and thus hiding the menu in this case is probably a good idea otherwise users may wonder what the heck is that message about?!

Simplemenu Settings

Scroll of fix menu

The Simplemenu can scroll with the page (the default) or be fixed at the top.

Fixing the menu at the top has two small issues:

The scrolling of the page remains 1 whole page so you lose a small part of what is being scrolled as part of the page is hidden at the top of the screen;
The "Site configuration" sub-menu is often growing to a size taller than your page and thus the items at the bottom become inaccessible.

In practice, though, it is generally better since you may scroll on your page and still access the entire Navigation menu.

Hide Delay

The time it takes to hide the menu when the mouse goes out of any one item.

This is important since while moving the mouse around to access an item you often move it outside of the menu. This delay prevents losing the menu at such time.

The default is 800 milliseconds.

Show Effect

Show an effect when opening the dropdown sub-menus. By default these effects are very fast (less than a second.)

The default is the Fade effect.

Fade — fade the menu in and out
Slide — slide the menu in and out; if you have large dropdowns, this may not always look good
None — no effect at all

Note that if you let many users access your Simplemenu, many will not have a powerful computer. This means the effect may be a problem for them. In that situation, I recommend None.

Show Speed

The speed at which the Show Effect is to be shown. By default, the effect is set of Fast.

The best way to know how it looks is to test the different settings in your browser.

Advanced Settings

Show to user ID 1

Whether the menu should appear to the top administrator or not.

By default it is shown to the administrator.

However, some administrators like to make use of the Simplemenu for their users and themselves make use of another administration menu. In that case, this feature offers a way to prevent displaying both menus at the same time.

SuperFish version

Because the Simplemenu has to work with many other modules and at times these other modules also make use of SuperFish, this option was created so you can decide which version is compatible with these other modules.

The special option "Custom or theme" is used when another module or theme already inserts SuperFish (as it should never be inserted more than once on the same page.)

Scope of Simplemenu menu variable

Simplemenu makes use of JavaScript. The PHP code generates a large JavaScript variable with all the necessary menu information. That variable is saved in the header by default. In some circumstances, that may not work right and thus it can be moved to the footer.

There should be no difference between either position, it is just more usual to have it in the header.

Another reason to put it in the footer is to accelerate the loading of your pages, especially if you offer the menu to all your users instead of just admins.

Cache the Simplemenu variable

The Simplemenu variable is pretty large and costly to rebuild on each access. It is possible to cache it so it is not regenerated every time you access your website. If you experience any problems (i.e. menu not being refreshed properly) try turning this feature off.

Menubar CSS z-index value

The Simplemenu drop-down menus are expected to appear over all the other items on the page. At times, other modules add an object with a z-index higher than the default used by Simplemenu. This option let you change the z-index to any large value.

For example, if you are using AddThis, the z-index needs to be set to a very large value: 2,000,001 (without the commas.)

Similarly, you may want the Simplemenu to appear below other objects (i.e. a pop-up window such as lightbox.)

Dropdown CSS z-index value

The Simplemenu drop-down system has many levels, the first is the Menubar appearing at the top. The second and following are the drop-downs. The CSS z-index of these can be changed using this input box.

There should be no need to change this z-index since all these items appear inside the menubar block and thus follow that z-index first. I first added this feature thinking it would be necessary. At this it is set to -1 and should certainly remain that way.

CSS select to attach menu to

By default, the Simplemenu is attached at the very top of the screen. To do so, we attach it to the BODY field. This option let you change the HTML item where the menu is attached.

It is particularly useful when you want to move the menu somewhere in your website page.

For example, you may have a Flash animation at the top and you do not want to mark that Flash animation as having a transparent background (i.e. it would be slower to play!) Thus, you want to move the Simplemenu widget under that Flash animation. It is simple. Look for the tag in your HTML that appears after the Flash animation and enter its name in this box. Say your HTML looks like this:

  <div id="header"><embed ... flash information ... ></div>
  <div id="content"><?php echo $content ?></div>

Then the CSS selector is div#content or just #content.

Attach method

The Simplemenu is attached to the specified HTML item in one of three different ways:

Prepend

Attach it at the beginning of the specified item. From our previous example, you'd get:

  <div id="header">...</div>
  <div id="content"><div id="simplemenu">...</div>...</div>

Append

Attach it at the end of the specified item. From our previous example, you'd get:

  <div id="header">...</div>
  <div id="content">...<div id="simplemenu">...</div></div>

Replace

Replace the specified item with the menu item. This can be done only with themes that have a special item that is expected to be replaced by the Simplemenu code. This is useful if you want the menu to appear at a specific location that cannot otherwise be obtained with the Prepend or Append features.

For example, you may want to have the menu between the header and content as defined here:

  <div id="header">...</div>
  <div id="place-simplemenu-here">...</div>
  <div id="content">...</div>

This may allow the menu to be wider than the content block. The CSS selector would be set to #place-simplemenu-here.

Theme Exclusion

Some themes are not compatible with the Simplemenu feature, although newer versions of this module are quite robust and I have not myself found a theme where the menu fail miserably, I'm sure a few still exists.

These check boxes or table1 allows you to prevent the menu from appearing whenever the website is used with particular themes.

Detect pop-up windows

This option is a smart feature. It checks a variable in JavaScript which is not set unless the window is considered a pop-up window.

The problem is that many times this assumption is wrong, especially when you clicked on a link from another website with the target="_blank" flag. Then the pop-up code thinks the new window is a pop-up (which in a way is true.)

By default, this flag is still set, which is probably wrong... but it has been that way for ages so I hesitate to change it.

The other way to avoid the Simplemenu in pop-up windows is to add the URLs in the Show block on specific pages (see below). That may not always be possible though (i.e. some pages may at times be shown as pop-ups, and at times not so...)

For detailed information, check Handling of Pop-up Windows by SimpleMenu.

Allow Simplemenu to call the theme() function

By default, Simplemenu is written to avoid calling to the theme() function. It is done so because otherwise attempting to change the theme with another module, such as themekey, fails.

However, once in a while, it is necessary to call the standard theme() function because it will further tweak the HTML generated by Simplemenu. For example, the Simplemenu Inactive Parent Menu requires the theme() function to be called. It captures those calls and tweak the menu item and change the anchor links (<a> tags) into plain text (<span> tags).

Show block on specific pages

This feature is used to allow Simplemenu on specific pages or not.

This is very similar to the same box of the Blocks interface.

By default, this feature prevents Simplemenu from appearing on the IMCE pop-up window and the noderelationships pages which are shown as pop-up windows.

Any number of pages can be added here.

1. Depending on the number of themes you've got, the settings will display the list of themes in a different way. When you have a large number of themes, we switch to a select list which makes it easier to select the themes.