| Joomla! Menus |
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| Written by Ken Task | |
| Monday, 11 September 2006 02:35 | |
In Joomla! CMS one can create versions of menus and have them display only on certain Section/Categories. In other words, the menus can change. Take for example, a High School Joomla! whose organization is by curricular areas - one Section content area for say "Social Studies" and several Categories under such as "Civics", "Economics", "World History", "American History", etc.. One could have a link on the main menu for "Curriculum", which, when clicked upon basically clears the main menu of the site and presents a menu of curriculum areas - one of which is "Social Studies". Clicking "Social Studies" an expanded menu drops to show all the "categories" under that section as well as display a "Social Studies" Department "home page". Yes, this does take more time in configuring the site, but when finished the Joomla!Master has accomplished a couple of things: 1. viewers are directed to the "beef" and a "focus" is set according to their selection 2. saved some "screen territory" ... a precious commodity ... as it is a fact that most "surfers" won't scroll down a screen very far at all. You might visit the SOS Joomla! web site for a "working" example. http://www.sosoftexas.org/ Items of interest: SOS Menu, SOS Web Links, Goliad ISD's Joomla! (under development) is another good example: http://labahia.goliadisd.org/joomla/ GISD, GHS, GMS, GES have their own menus. NOTE: the link above may eventually break when the site goes live! In the event it has gone live, just stripe out the /joomla/ in the URL and TIA (try it again!). Also, let me know about the broken link and I'll correct it. Some "out there" might be thinking, "drop down-extended menus" would do the same and are "better". Well, that might be true ... it all depends upon your ISD's "accessibility compliance" (how well vision-impaired screen readers can handle the "drop down-extended menus"). For more information about accessibility issues, please see the National Center on Disability and Access to Education site at: http://ncdae.org/tools/factsheets/cms.cfm Note: Joomla! is specifically mentioned ... as well as Moodle. Joomla: http://help.joomla.org/content/view/805/125/ Moodle: http://docs.moodle.org/en/Accessibility On a related note: many web sites use links to Word documents, PowerPoint, and PDF. The National Center site above specifically addresses those mention: Word: http://ncdae.org/tools/factsheets/word.cfm PowerPoint: http://ncdae.org/tools/factsheets/powerpoint.cfm PDF: http://ncdae.org/tools/factsheets/pdf.cfm  SOS site syndication.
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