By Mark Allan on Mon, 23 Nov 2009 19:42:26 GMT

Download DDRMenu from www.dnngarden.com

DNN Garden are delighted to announce the release of DDRMenu, the new free templated menu provider for DotNetNuke. Depending on your needs, there are essentially 3 ways you can use DDRMenu, covering the full spectrum from simply improving your existing skin through plugging in a pre-built jQuery / CSS menu to building a completely new menu style using the powerful templating engine:

1. Drop-in upgrade for SolPartMenu and DNNMenu

2. Pre-built templated menus

3. DIY templated menus

Common Features

Some of the features that DDRMenu brings to any DotNetNuke menu are:

• It can display a subset of pages, e.g. top-level only, children of current page, etc
• It can be used as either a module or a skin object
• It supports Apollo page localisation
• It allows you to plug in custom code to alter (or completely replace) the menu structure

What’s coming next?

Now that the core templating engine is stable, I’ll be working on the actual templates. Initially, this will involve improving the mega-menu and completing a new template that provides a simple, easily-stylable dropdown menu with full cross-browser compatibility and some optional effects such as LavaLamp. However, I’ll be happy to listen to any requests, so do head off to the forums and leave your suggestions (and be sure to sign up for updates while you’re there)!

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Mark Allan (@MarkXA)
DNN Garden

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By Mark Allan on Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:45:14 GMT

As you can see, most of the menu templates for the DDRMenu make use of jQuery. We all love jQuery, it makes our sites fast and pretty! Unfortunately, as several people have noticed, even with the jQuery support added in DNN v5 it is still difficult to use jQuery in a DNN module or skin object without running the risk of conflicting with another module on the site that also uses it. The trouble is, when you’re building a module for general distribution any of the following might or might not be the case:

The skin or DNN portal doesn’t load jQuery at all. The skin or DNN portal loads a version of jQuery earlier than the one you need. A module further up the page loads a version of jQuery earlier than the one you need. A module further down the page is going to load a version of jQuery earlier than the one you need and splat your instance. There’s been a bit of community discussion about how best to get around this, so I thought I’d share my approach. Basically, I came to the conclusion that...

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