A talk I gave at DNNWorld in Orlando on DDRMenu.

1. 1 Company Confidential
Introduction to DDRMenu
Mark Allan
www.dnngarden.com

2. 2 Company Confidential
What we’ll be covering
 Evolution of DDRMenu
 Upgrading existing skins
 Included and freely available menus
 Building your own menus
 Configuration
 “Power user” features

3. 3 Company Confidential
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Evolution of DDRMenu

4. 4 Company Confidential
Evolution of DDRMenu – v1.0
 Development started late 2008, straight DNNMenu
replacement
 Extended to emulate SolPart
 XSL templates introduced
 v1.0 released as freeware June 2009

5. 5 Company Confidential
Evolution of DDRMenu – v2.0
 v2.0 with token and Razor templating released as open
source start of March 2011
 Donated to DotNetNuke by end of March!
 Used in DNN 6 for UL mega menus in default skin, admin
menu and actions menu

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Upgrading existing skins

7. 7 Company Confidential
What’s wrong with DNNMenu?
 V1 uses onclick instead of true hyperlinks
• Poor SEO
• Poor accessibility
• No URL on mouseover
• No right-click support
 Browser sniffing not feature detection
 Only one style
 Limited support

8. 8 Company Confidential
How does DDRMenu help?
 Renders as unordered list in HTML source
 jQuery for cross-browser compatibility
 Converts UL to DNNMenu layout at client
 Overlays hyperlinks
 Adds animations
 Same approach for SolPart
 Templates for user-defined menu types

9. 9 Company Confidential
Upgrading DNNMenu
1. Install DDRMenu (if pre-DNN 6)
2. Replace
<dnn:NAV ProviderName="DNNMenuNavigationProvider">
with
<dnn:NAV ProviderName="DDRMenuNavigationProvider">
3. That’s it …

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Demo
Upgrading a DNNMenu

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Beyond DNNMenu

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Included with DNN 6
 DarkKnight standard menu
 DarkKnight mega-menu
 Admin mega-menu
 Actions mega-menu

13. 13 Company Confidential
Free templates
 dnnddrmenutemplates.codeplex.com
• Superfish
• Treeview
• Accordion
• Breadcrumb
• Sitemap
• HTML <select>
• jQuery UI menu (once jQuery UI 1.9 released)
• Starter UL templates
• Community contributions:
 Mega menu
 …?

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Demo
Using ready-made templates

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Building your own menus

16. 16 Company Confidential
Building your own templates
 XSLT
• Very flexible
• Supported in all versions of DNN & .NET
• Can be a bit scary if not used to functional programming
 Razor
• Completely flexible - access to DotNetNuke API
• Only in DNN 5.6 or 6 with .NET 4
• C# or VB
 Tokens
• Relatively easy
• A bit restrictive

17. 17 Company Confidential
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Demo
Custom templates

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Configuration

19. 19 Company Confidential
Choosing pages to show
 NodeSelector
• “rootonly” – top level only
• “rootchildren” – children of current root page
• “currentchildren” – children of current page
• {root},{skip},{depth} – more complex scenarios
 IncludeNodes
 ExcludeNodes
 IncludeHidden

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Demo
Choosing pages to show

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Power features

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Power features
 Add as module
 Use as action menu
 Automatic internationalisation
 Custom node manipulation
 Localisation of custom strings
 Supply custom XML

23. 23 Company Confidential
Summary
 Upgrade DNNMenu and Solpart for a quick win in existing
skins
 Use new templates for simple new skins
 Create your own templates for more complex menus (e.g.
conversions)
 Contribute the results!

24. 24 Company Confidential
Resources
 Download: http://dnnddrmenu.codeplex.com
 Templates: http://dnnddrmenutemplates.codeplex.com
 Support: http://forums.dotnetnuke.com
 Documentation: http://wiki.dotnetnuke.com
 Me: http://www.dnngarden.com

25. 25 Company Confidential
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Questions?
mark@dnngarden.com / MarkXA