[TYPO3-english] Special content in submenu + What to do with HMENU/stdWrap

[Christopher Torgalson]

Hi,

On 29-Oct-08, at 7:00 AM, Tyler Kraft wrote:

> Hi
>
> It's great, I've used it to build all kinds of things.
>
> When you think about it slightly abstractly a menu is just a list of
> records in the beginning. So using the stdWrap (and all tis different
> properties, including the ability to return a list from a select) on  
> the
> 'value' of the HMENU 'special' property you can load your menu with  
> just
> about any list of numbers. And then using the before and after
> properties for menu items you can render just about anything you want,
> from any table you want and in any layout you want, with any  
> additional
> functionality you want (eg javascript calls, etc)

Just to follow up on this with a concrete example of how powerful  
HMENU + stdWrap is (without even listing a table other than pages):

My extension bh_firtools (which is basically just a lot of Typoscript  
objects) is made to help produce image-replacement menus with  
Typoscript. This means we need (1) to build a background image for  
every page in the menu, (2) to build a CSS declaration for each page's  
menu item, and (3) to output a menu with an id attribute in the list  
item or link that matches the declaration from (2).

(3) is simple enough, just a standard HMENU with TMENU + stdWrap to  
build an id attribute like 'id="menu_item_356" where '356' is the uid  
of the page in question. (1) and (2) combine by using HMENU/TMENU +  
stdWrap to build an IMG_RESOURCE cObject (i.e. just the path to a  
GIFBUILDER image) something like 'typo3temp/GB/foo.gif,' and then  
including that in a CSS declaration something like this:

/* Dynamic CSS for  "Foo" menu item */
#menu_item_356 a {
	background-image:url(typo3temp/GB/foo.gif);
	background-position:0 0
	/* Etc… */
}

To give a further idea of how well this works in TYPO3, the 'menu' of  
CSS declarations shown above is output to a page in the BE that's  
configured using TS to send the appropriate headers for a CSS file and  
which is linked to from the head of every page. Finally, using  
RealURL, it's possible to give that page a file name making it a real  
CSS document for all intents.

You can see this in use at www.typo3apprentice.com/ (look at the main  
menu and the link to 'dynamic-css/style.css' in the head of the pages)


--
Christopher Torgalson
http://www.typo3apprentice.com/