Better performance with Menubar 4.4
December 14th, 2009
Menubar 4.4 improves the speed and performance of your site by moving all the menu data from a database table to a single serialized option.
This way Menubar doesn’t need multiple calls to the database in order to fetch all your menu items, and the menu generation is much more efficient.
To mention a real case, the WP Menubar demo site used to need from 40 to 44 queries per page with the previous Menubar version, while it needs just 24 to 28 queries per page with Menubar 4.4.
Saving about 16 queries per page is a nice improvement, so I hope you’ll like this new version, more so when your site experiences a traffic peak. Happy Holidays!
Categories: WordPress Menubar
Very nice plugin. I found a theme that I really liked but it didn’t have a top navigation bar. I was able to use WP Menubar to add the navigation bar to my site. A little bit of tweaking to the .css file for the chosen theme and it matches up quite nicely to my site. It’s not as pretty as if the navigation bar was designed into the theme, but it works very well and looks good for what I’m doing.
Thanks for a nice plugin!
Hello Bill,
your Menubar customization is really nice! Wish you good luck with your site.
hi,
i really like the menubar! great work!
but i have one question:
i’m using the f8 theme and i like just one button above the slideshow that i name ‘portfolio’ and which shows my different catagories. how can i achieve this goal???
i really don’t need the bar, just one tiny little button!
thanks for the help!
marc
Hi Marc,
using the Suckerfish or Superfish template, you could create a single menu item with type CategoryTree, which gets all your categories. Then if you wish to remove the horizontal bar you could edit the CSS file and change the bar color to transparent. And of course you can customize the rest of the CSS according to your needs!
hi, dontdreamit,
love the menubar plugin and the fact that you improved it to minimize the number of queries. it’s that kind of attention to detail that’s making your plugin stand out from others.
i got a question: is there any way to export the menu i’ve created, so i don’t have to re-create it when i go from dev to live build?
thanks!
Hi Sergi,
currently the only way to move a menu structure from a development site to the live one is to copy and paste from the database, with a tool like phpMyAdmin.
Go the options table of the development site and locate the record with option_name “menubar”, then copy the content of the option_value field from that record to the corresponding record in the live site.
That works immediately as long as the post IDs, category IDs and so on are the same in both sites, otherwise you’ll need to edit your menu items after importing them.
Is it possible to automatically add a newly created page or post to the menu bar?
Or is there a function that can be called to programmatically add a new menu item?
Thanks,
Ivan
Hi Ivan,
currently the only items automatically added to a menu are new pages in a PageTree item and new categories in a CategoryTree item.
Could you email me (andrea AT dontdream.it) with details of your needs? Your request looks interesting and it could become a Menubar feature in a coming version.
i’d looked in phpMyAdmin but couldn’t figure it out. great, thanks for getting back to me, andrea. i’ll check out option_name