when I select the menu bar and look on the toolbar to the right under “Menu” in the list of pages, the last page is grayed out/not on the menu and I can’t add it to the menu bar even though auto add pages is selected.
Sparkle will not add items that won’t fit. You can make the menu narrower, edit the text of each item to contain fewer words, change the text size, or any combination of these.
In 1956 George Miller published results of his research on our capacity to process information in short term memory. This is most often referenced as the inability to handle more than 5-7 pieces of information for more than 15-30 seconds.
So back to the menu, you should not overwhelm your site visitors with more than say 6 menu options, you should actually work hard to curate them and provide options that are clearly distinct and easy to decide on.
Of course each option can then be a sub-menu, or an intermediate “routing” page, again with a similar choice restriction.
With all that in mind, on the desktop device it should be easy enough to fit 6 item. And if space is an issue you can use submenus and the hamburger menu.
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Thanks, that’s what i had, six items. I deleted the old menu, added a new and was able to add all my pages.
No. There’s something funny going on which looks like a bug (but I’ve only just started using Sparkle so it’s probably me).
There is something I do which causes the right-most item to drop off the menu and there is no way to get it back after that - other than delete the menu and re-create it. If I undo far enough, it can bring the item back but this involves undoing WAY past the point at which the item disappeared and isn’t really practical as other actions are affected. As talkgtr said, the menu item is in the inspector list but greyed out. Once it goes, any new items added to the menu will be likewise greyed out and will not show in the menu.
Sparkle does seem able to add items that won’t fit, leaving the user to move, expand, alter as necessary to make it look OK. But this seems to be something else because undoing whatever one does to cause the menu item to disappear (I think it’s a move of the menu - happens suddenly without warning and often unnoticed) does not bring the item back.
Having said that, this is the first thing I have found after a few days with Sparkle that I have not been able to get around. I love Sparkle. It’s how I imagine iWeb would have eventually ended up had Apple kept developing it. I’ve been struggling for about a week with Wix to do what I wanted but I managed to re-create it all with Sparkle in a few hours. Incredibly easy to use. The live preview feature is FANTASTIC!
I’m using Sparkle version 2.8.10 (4296) on an i7-based early 2015 MacBook Air running Catalina 10.15.3.
Regards, Ken
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Hello Ken,
just now I have the same problem. Cannot get a greyed menu item back. So I will have to recreate the menu. Thanks,
Ben
Same here. Greyed items don’t get black & shown. But recreating doesn’t work either. I now have just ONE black menu-item while the menu is page wide. It’s in a new site, no previous baggage.