Drop Down Menus Help Needed

Can someone point me in the direction of simple, clear explanation of how to create drop down menus? I’ve looked thru documentation, vids and elsewhere but everything that I’ve found hasn’t helped. I’m looking for a;

  1. do this
  2. then, do this
  3. done

In other words, I need basic stuff.

Thanks all!

Hi Scott.

  1. Go to Youtube
  2. Watch this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xqWQ7_1w0_A
  3. Try it!

Mr. F.

Hi @scovar,

the menu system is very flexible, so there are many ways to do that, but I guess that’s also making things confusing.

Option 1, using the automatic mode and site structure <-> menu item mapping:

  1. start with a blank project
  2. add a page in a new section
  3. so now you have a page named “page 1”, a section named “section 1” and a “page 2” inside it
  4. add a menu in the first page, this is what it will look like:

Option 2, manual mode:

  1. start with a blank project
  2. add a menu, uncheck the “auto-add pages” (which is the automatic site structure <-> menu item mapper)
  3. click on the little drop down menu icon, below the list of menu items (which at this point only has “home”)
  4. this is what you end up with:

Now with all this a few points to consider:

  • with an existing site, interacting with the menu inspector can be a bit more complex, for example in automatic mode you can’t add a sub-menu to the items that correspond to site pages, only to items you have added yourself with +, on the other hand in manual mode the menu is populated with all the pages in the site, which you probably want to clean up and hide or remove the items you don’t need
  • you can always drag and drop in our out of submenus
  • at some point in the growth of the site the navigation gets complex enough that you most likely will want to switch to manual mode (turning off auto-add), to control which pages are shown in your menus

Hope this helps, if this helps you get Sparkle menus it would be great if you could mention what the misunderstanding was, perhaps it can help us improve our documentation.

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