Introduction

The Menu Editor plug-in is a framework for creating and maintaining the navigational structure of Escenic publications. It includes the following main components:

  • A menu editor for creating and modifying menus. This editor is a web application that can be accessed from within Web Studio.

  • A set of Java objects to represent the menus defined with the menu editor.

  • A tag library that provides template developers with an easy way of accessing the menu beans.

A menu is a list of menu items that can be displayed for navigation purposes in a publication, typically as links. Each menu item usually has at least one label (the text that will be displayed in the publication). Menu items can, however, have multiple labels in different languages. They can also have image URLs, which can be used to make graphical links.

Here is a typical publication menu:

graphics/displayed-menu.png

This menu (displayed in the blue upper bar) contains 6 menu items, one of which - Sport - is currently selected, resulting in the display of three sub-items in the lower bar.

Here is the same menu as it appears in the menu editor:

graphics/menu-editor.png

The menu (called main-menu) is defined in the tree view on the left. As you can see, it contains 6 menu items corresponding to the items in the displayed menu. You can see that the selected Sport menu item is associated with the publication's Sport section (shown in the tree view on the right), and that the Sport section has three subsections that correspond to the items in the publication sub-menu. Precisely how the menu definition, publication structure and displayed menu are related will be discussed in the rest of this manual.

The menu editor allows you to create a number of different menu item types:

section

For creating links to publication sections (the most commonly-used type).

article

For creating links to individual content items.

link

For creating links to specific URLs (usually external to the publication).

space

For inserting spaces in menus.

includeMenu

To enable re-use of menus.

Menus defined with the menu editor are stored in a publication resource file called menu. This resource is an XML file, and its structure is defined in an XML DTD supplied with the plug-in. This means that you do not have to use the menu editor to create menus: you can edit and upload them in the same way as other publication resources if you so wish.

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