Template Development

Menus defined with the menu editor are stored in a publication's menu resource, an XML file stored in the publication's META-INF/escenic/publication-resources/escenic/plugins folder. The menus defined in the file are made available to the template developer as MenuItem Java objects, which can be accessed using the menu tag library. This tag library is supplied as part of the Menu Editor plugin.

The menus created using the menu tag library can potentially contain large amounts of dynamic content, in which case rendering them might become a time-consuming process. It such cases it may be a good idea to use the <util:cache> JSP tag to improve menu performance.

Caching the menus may have a significant effect, since menus are usually identical for all page views in a section; sometimes even for all page views.