[how to] interesting menu / search functionality

[theothersimon]

I recently came across http://www.philipphaemmerle.com/ it has a nice example of a menu / search functionality that I have been trying to create for my own portfolio of design work (its made with drupal i think). edit: its made with plone

If you can ignore the photos and concentrate on the top nav and imagine that you would return links to cmsms webpages rather than to images, how would you approach doing this?

I have toyed around with pi search and I can do something a bit similar but its not quite right.

If you had to do something like this, how would you do it within CMSMS?

Cheers!

[calguy1000]

it would be relatively easy to create a menu manager template (and possibly an accompanying UDT) that just builds a pulldown and a 'go' button.  Or, it may even be all done in javascript with a pulldown that when an item is selected automatically redirects you to that page.

[theothersimon]

Thanks for the pointers, I will investigate.

Edit:

First question: What is a UDT in this context? uh doh! 'user defined tags': ok thats interesting new territory for me. I will checkout the documentation.

After a look at making a menu manager template, I can see how to output standard menus as a dropdowns, that looks pretty striaghtforward, but surely this would give quite different functionality to the example?

The example would seem to act more like a set of filters? Am i wrong?

[cyberman]

Would be nice if you can post the solution here ...

[calguy1000]

After a look at making a menu manager template, I can see how to output standard menus as a dropdowns, that looks pretty striaghtforward, but surely this would give quite different functionality to the example?

The example would seem to act more like a set of filters? Am i wrong?

Yes.... You are correct, the example you posted above looks like it is using the dropdown boxes to select criterian to build an SQL query from some seperate tables.  This looks like a custom application.

Now..... if you would like to use this analagy(sp) and apply it to CMS Made Simple pages, then maybe you could have pulldowns for Author, Modified dates, Categories (parent menu items)... etc.  This is also possible with CMS Made Simple, but wouldn't be a simple menu manager template.

For this, you'd probably want to write a custom plugin or a module that could query the database directly to get results.

[theothersimon]

Thanks Calguy, that makes sense. Possibly a little out of my depth with trying to write a module, its outside my experience, and php / js is not my strong point, but I always want to try..

I was also thinking about another approach:

If I set set very specific metatags, strings that would not crop up by chance, that denote what kind of content a page (print design, web design, creation date etc), and then use the search module to look for those tags.

From a quick look at the search form template, it looks quite possible to remove the input field and then code in a few dropdowns, with specific search criteria hard coded, the user would then select search options and press submit.

A custom search results template would then display the results.

Does this sound feasible?  Or is it ifull of holes?

[Dr.CSS]

You can find this type of thing on dynamicdrive.com.... and adapt it to your needs...

[theothersimon]

Wel, l I headed over to Dynamic Drive, nice to go back there, havent looked at it for a long time.

Found nothing relevant at all unfortunately..

[Dr.CSS]

this one...

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicinde ... /index.htm

comes from this one...

http://www.dynamicdrive.com/dynamicinde ... /index.htm

[theothersimon]

Thanks Mark, I didnt see that when I was looking.

Its an interesting twist on a similar theme, not quite what i had in mind functionality wise, but maybe I can do someting with it..