[RESOLVED] database driven menus

[djwinder]

Hi everyone

Im looking to pick the brain of someone with experience in creating menus that dynamicly alter depending on the content of a database which the site uses. I havent tried anything like this before so advice on technologies, techniques and common pit falls would be greatly aprishiated as would any scripts that i could adapt to use which would give me a good idea how everything fits together.

i need a menu that displays a number of catagoires (dependant on the number of catagories in the database) and then a number of sub catagoies also if the color scheme could be easily adapted that would be ideal.

thanks in advance

[nemonoman]

There are lots of scripts, free or not, that provide for this. These are very tricky, and I recommend you find one to modify, not build from scratch.

Nearly all these scripts, to some extent, depend on Javascript.

What you will need to do then, is use PHP/SQL to output Javascript, or modifications to Javascript.

This is fairly easy to do, but it is a king hell bitch to debug. It is particularly hard when you need to create an elaborate datastructure for dynamic hierachical menus. I speak for bitter experience.

My advice is to menus of as little depth as possible:
Top Menu>Bottom menu1, bottom menu2, bottom menu 3

Not:

Top Menu>mid menu 1>lower menu 1>Bottom menu1, bottom menu2, bottom menu 3

lower menu 2>Bottom menu 4, bottom menu 5
mid menu 2>Lower menu 3>Bottom menu6

etc..

If possible.

Also when choosing the script you plan to use, be sure to check that
menu label elements
and
style elements

are indiividually isolated and called out, not embedded in the Javascript.

Good luck.

[djwinder]

cheers for the advice i ahve taken that on board and will progress (due to time constraints) with a much more simple menu system.