Introduction

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

  • A set of Java objects for representing menus.

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

  • A CUE plugin allowing menu structures to be edited in the CUE editor.

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.

Menus are defined in special Content Store publication resources called menu resources. Like most of the standard Content Store publication resources described in the Escenic Content Engine Resource Reference, the menu resource is an XML file. Once you have created a menu resource for a publication you can upload it to the Content Store in the same way as you upload other resources, using the escenic-admin web application (for details, see http://docs.escenic.com/ece-server-admin-guide//upload_resources1.html)

The menu resource file can be used to define 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.

For a detailed description of the menu resource format, see Menu Resource Reference.

Prior to version 3.0, the Menu Editor plug-in included an editor, a small Java applet that ran inside Web Studio. This very old editor has now been withdrawn due to Java/browser compatibility problems and has been replaced by a menu editor plug-in for CUE in version 3.1. The menu resource format is in fact very simple, so if you don't use CUE you can edit menu resources directly in a text editor.