Forum Home Enhancements - UKBL ~ Quality Drop Down Menu System

UKBL ~ Quality Drop Down Menu System

You wanted Drop down Menu's that were easy to install and edit, Well now you've got it

Live Demo

http://www.aboxcafe.com/index.php

http://www.wheelsbd.com/

Compatible with almost ALL Browsers.

Hi Guys, i've had so many messages about My "Easy Menu Tabs" and when was i going to do Dropdown Tabs, Well i've listened and now i can happily add UKBL ~ Quality Drop Down menu's to our list of modifications.

This is just so easy to edit and install, as long as you feel confident with a few simple edits and uploading a graphics file to your images directory or even your photobucket account, if you don't want to mess about uploading to your server.

UKBL ~ Quality Drop Downs sit quite happily on top of your forums accessable from all pages of the forum



They look like any bog standard Menu Nav bar but when you hover the mouse over it you'll see the dropdowns, I've uploaded a test version to my forum, Take a look for yourselves http://www.ukbusinesslive.co.uk/forum

I've left the Top White Easy Men Bar in place also so you can compare both of them.

When you go over the menu bar the dropdowns should appear like in the picture below



See how the chosen links are highlighted

So now we come to the installation stage.

Download the dropdown.zip file below and open the VBOrg_Menu.txt file in notepad or any other text editor, as we need to edit a few files.

The first one we need to edit is the url of our Graphic File, So to cut a long story short we'll upload our graphic file to our Photobucket account, or any other account or image directory on your server, So firstly find

	/*"""""""" (MAIN) Container Edit Picture URL Here :-) """"""""*/	
	#qm0	
	{	
		padding:5px;
		background-image:url(http://i475.photobucket.com/albums/rr114/ukbusinesslive/center_tile_blue.gif);
		border-width:1px;
		border-style:solid;
		border-color:#eeeeee;
	}

and this is the line we need to edit, so that it gives us a nice gradiant blue acdcross the menu bar

background-image:url(http://i475.photobucket.com/albums/rr114/ukbusinesslive/center_tile_blue.gif);

Just replace the url within the brackets ( ) and thats it

Then we go and do the menu edits, You don't want your members click on your forum menu and ending up on my site :erm: So what we need to do now is change the menu links for yours, It take about 15 min's but its not hard to do, so lets do it.....

First find where our menu starts, This will be right at the bottom of the code, The HTML part of this and the first bit we need to change starts from here...

 <li><a class="qmparent" href="javascript:void(0)">MY CONTROL PANEL</a>

		<ul>
		<li><a href="http://www.ukbusinesslive.co.uk/forum/profile.php?do=editavatar" title="Edit Avatar">Edit Avatar</a></li>
		<li><a href="http://www.ukbusinesslive.co.uk/forum/profile.php?do=editsignature" title="Edit Signature">Edit Signature</a></li>
		<li><a href="http://www.ukbusinesslive.co.uk/forum/profile.php?do=editoptions" title="Edit Options">Edit Options</a></li>
		<li><span class="qmdivider qmdividerx" ></span></li>
		<li><a href="http://www.ukbusinesslive.co.uk/forum/subscription.php?do=viewsubscription" title="List Subscriptions">List Subscriptions</a></li>
		</ul></li>

Basically each tab is made up of a block like what you see above, You have the Main Tab Description which looks like this

<li><a class="qmparent" href="javascript:void(0)">MY CONTROL PANEL</a>

and you have all the sub links underneath and they look like this...

<li><a href="http://www.ukbusinesslive.co.uk/forum/profile.php?do=editavatar" title="Edit Avatar">Edit Avatar</a></li>

and its this one which we need to edit, basically if you want to keep the same link, all you need to do is to chasnge my url http://www.ukbusinesslive.co.uk/forum to your forums URL, and thats it, your link should work for your site.

If you want to change the link altogether and put your own, then replace the full URL with one that you want and don't forget to edit the end part "Edit Avatar" as that is the title thats shown on the dropdown.

When you've finished all your editing, we need to upload this whole code to your Header Template of the Style that your Currantly using on your forum, So once you've saved your edited code, Just copy and paste directly to your Header, Go right to the end and click paste, save the template and thats it, The Graphic File which you need to upload to your server or image host is also in the zip file.

So easy and a great improvement to any VBulletin Forum

This is a Freebie for all you members on VB.org with my compliments

If anyone wants any custom menus made, Just PM me I'll help where i can, Just bear in mind a menu like this takes a good couple of hours or so, so a donation is more than welcomed

Oh almost Forgot guys,

If you like it, Please Click on Installed, as this really does motivate me to improving these hacks

UPDATE 09.02.09

Uploaded a New Zip File, Black Menu.Zip This is the same as this original except that its black for darker Websites and Forums, Instructions are the same as above, and comes complete with customised Graphics which will need to be uploaded to your /images/ directory.



UPDATE 23.02.09

For some of you Admins who prefer menu Buttons as opposed to a menu bar, i've made some buttons based on the above menu formate, You can install it by following the same instructions as the main install, Just upload the graphics and edit your menu links and thats it.

Experiment with the css to change colors width of boxes etc, Add more or as little as you want, the important thing is to have fun learning.



UPDATE: 26th April 2009

Centering the Menu so that it appears central

There has been much debate about trying to centralise the menu tabs, I didn't want to edit the code too much as this would make a mess of it in different browsers, However i've found that there is a way

The easiest way to center menu content is to place it inside of a center aligned table, as shown below:

<table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 align="center"><tr><td>

----[ your menu structure]----

</td></tr></table>

This way the menu tabs will appear central in all browsers.

Hope this helps :up:



Enjoy

[UKBusinessLive]

Originally Posted by PakFuse

Nice

can you guide me a bit on how to do it...? (I will have 16x16 images - much like emoticons)

Don't worry I am not a novice in Javascript etc. but not a pro as well... so would need a pointer or two

Thanks for the great work man.

Hi PakFuse

The menu links are done in HTML, so they are very easy to edit with a basic knowledge of HTML.

I take it you want something like this??



All you need to do is to add this to the description part of the tab link, first find the Menu link that you want to add a picture to

<li><a href="http://www.ukbusinesslive.co.uk/forum/faq.php" title="Search F.A.Q">Search F.A.Q</a></li>

Then look at the end of the code where we see >Search F.A.Q </a>

and what we need to do is to add our code in between the > < but infront of the "Search FAQ

So this is the code were going to add

<img src="http://i475.photobucket.com/albums/rr114/ukbusinesslive/film.gif" border="0">

You can call a file from your servers image/misc directory or photbucket or another image host like i did and we need to copy that line of code directly in front of the Search F.A.Q but inside the two > <

Like this

<li><a href="http://www.ukbusinesslive.co.uk/forum/faq.php" title="Search F.A.Q"><img src="http://i475.photobucket.com/albums/rr114/ukbusinesslive/film.gif" border="0">Search F.A.Q</a></li>
		</ul></li>

If you do that with all your dropdowns then it should look quite cool.

Have Fun

[KevinL]

Originally Posted by Wayne Luke

Does this take into account template hooks for the navbar?

if it took the place of the old navbar and had the hooks that would be massively cool!

Keep up the great work though!!

[UKBusinessLive]

Originally Posted by KevinL

if it took the place of the old navbar and had the hooks that would be massively cool!

Keep up the great work though!!

Thanks Kevin

Been wondering all day at work what Wayne meant by that, if i knew how the hooks worked on the VB Navbar then i would have a clearer picture, Perhaps i'll make that my Next Project

watch this space

[KevinL]

Originally Posted by UKBusinessLive

Thanks Kevin

Been wondering all day at work what Wayne meant by that, if i knew how the hooks worked on the VB Navbar then i would have a clearer picture, Perhaps i'll make that my Next Project

watch this space

I was thinking of adding the hooks on my navbar for my site...it's a little different then this as it uses js also so this is probably better I don't know how I would do it on mine.

This is should really just be a matter of adding the hooks where they belong. Like if you look at the default navbar that should give you a good idea. The only problem with that any product that gets added they just have to go in and change to use your markup instead of the default one. Sounds pretty cool actually

Can't wait to see what you come up with next

[PakFuse]

Thanks UKBL

you rock

*Reserved for Now* But will be tweaking things before I click on Install... I definitely need this.....

[PakFuse]

OK.... please, help me understand what am I possibly doing wrong here

oops.. i mean to make

the only thing I did was to take out the background image option from the style :erm:


Please help

Everything is already "dropped down" lol...


PS: All Javascripts and other Codes are intact ... I only played with UL and LI codes.....

[UKBusinessLive]

Originally Posted by PakFuse

OK.... please, help me understand what am I possibly doing wrong here

oops.. i mean to make

the only thing I did was to take out the background image option from the style :erm:


Please help

Everything is already "dropped down" lol...


PS: All Javascripts and other Codes are intact ... I only played with UL and LI codes.....

If you didn't want the blue gradiant along the bar all you had to do was not upload it or add it to the css part of the code, you shouldn't of deleted or changed anything, It looks like you've deleted a bit more of the css or javascript part of the coding.
Post here your code and i'll take a look

[PakFuse]

actually weird :-s

I created a simple html local page and tested on computer locally... it seems to be working... posting them at the end of header is giving problem... I wonder why

[UKBusinessLive]

Originally Posted by PakFuse

actually weird :-s

I created a simple html local page and tested on computer locally... it seems to be working... posting them at the end of header is giving problem... I wonder why

Not sure its working fine for me Are you using vba ???

[PakFuse]

No...

Vb 3.8.1...

I have another dropdown menu which is working but I do not wish to keep it using.... anything i need to add or delete, it takes a lot of efforts at too many places...

Your code is working fine when testing locally... I am just wondering why would it not work otherwise... I actually cut-copied-pasted the code from Header where it was not working into a notepad and saved as local html file and it worked....