Display "Mega-Dropdown" Using Menu Pane Group

Displaying a menu directly in a Menu Pane group enables more complex menu layouts than using a Menu widget. You can easily create a menu containing "mega-dropdown" panes with complex multi-column layouts.

To display a menu in this way, add a Menu Pane group to your template. In the Menu Pane's group options set the following fields:

Reference

Set this option to Sections in menu.

Menu name

Enter the name of a menu you have created for this publication using the Content Engine's Menu Editor plug-in.

You can now add groups, areas and widgets to the Menu Pane group to define the layout of the drop-down pane you want to be shown for the sections in menu. You can use all the same components that you would use when creating a section page layout: Data Sources, Teaser widgets and so on. When the user selects a section from the menu, then the selected section is supplied to these components as the context section, and a pane layout is created.

The drop down pane is only displayed for the sections in the menu: other elements such as articles and links are simply rendered as links in the usual way.