Drop-Down Menus that are not Menus…

Any help? I realize this is like the last taboo of wordpress or something. I have found millions of other help topics on things but not this. Anyone help?

It’s still just a fancy dropdown menu, the difference being that it has an arrow instead of a textual link to inact the dropdown.

In terms of having a dropdown, well yes there certainly are CSS only solutions, but you’ll need more then CSS to handle pulling in the content to the dropdown.

That particular site uses lots of scripts, various jQuery scripts, amongst other things, it’s not something that can be explained simply because there’s alot of stuff going on.

You’ll likely find more relevant information if you search for jQuery menus.
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=jquery+dropdowns
https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=jquery+menu

It’s alot of work to create something unique like that particular menu if a free one isn’t available on the web, it involves HTML, CSS, PHP(it will in WordPress), and Javascript/jQuery, unless you have experience with those things or know someone who has lots of time to spare, you’ll be at it quite some time.

Best advice i can give you is find something free that comes as close to what you want, then work at hacking away at it and making it fit what you need it to do, beyond that you should break down the information you need and ask one thing at a time, you won’t realistically find someone who will walk you through the process of making something like that from scratch (i’m just being honest with you on this point).

I appreciate the response, thank you. I knew this was going to be difficult. But I am a little confused…

We can place links and such inside of the drop down what is stopping me from just using the CSS drop down box like a webpage? I see 100% CSS drop down menus carry links, text and such, why would it not be able to carry images, excerpts and an advertisement if I manually code the UL and LI HTML commands?

Maybe New York Post was an extreme example… but all the drop down menus just have standard anchor links and I don’t know why I couldn’t “exchange” the links for HTML content?

Thoughts on this?

I know what you’re saying, but usually what most people will do, is not render(grab/receive/fetch) any of that data until it’s requested (ie. when the menu drops down or is clicked). A term for doing that, or common approach is Ajax, which is another method of dealing with data in itself.

The alternative would be to grab all that data on the initial page load, it’s there but hidden, until the menu is hovered/clicked. However doing so would create huge load times and result in loads of queries(well depending on what you’re grabbing), but this is exactly why such methods as Ajax exist, so you can load data when it’s needed, and not all in one go (i’m only just starting to wrap my head around Ajax myself, i know a little JS and jQuery and i do struggle – but knowing a fair amount of PHP has helped a great deal).

When a menu consists of pieces of text you can obviously afford to just load it all on the initial page load, it’s minimal when compared to pulling up(for example) some recent posts, which would need a connection to the database, and queries to get the data, etc…

Not sure i really explained myself very well, so apologies if that doesn’t make much sense. Perhaps someone else can explain it better.

I appreciate you answering me. I have created a dummy page that actually does what I want it to. It drops down, it opens a box and I can fit content into the box. No need for jquery or java or ajax. I had the hardest time aligning the drop down across the entire “container” but I think I have this fixed.

So if anyone is interested, take a basic drop down CSS. Remove the AHREF links and add in images and or excerpts. It works. No extra scripting or added elements really needed.

An excerpt is pulled from the database though, so your page load time is dependant on that query being finished in order to render that part of the menu(and continue rendering the rest of the page), as will be the case for any other excerpts or such that you load into those menus(if you’re calling them via a loop for example).

It might be fine for your usage, i just wanted to explain how putting content into the menu in that manner can have an impact on your load times, etc… though admittedly my last response didn’t explain it well.

Happy you’ve got what you wanted in any case… ??