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Menubar 4.7 improves the PageTree and CategoryTree item types, adding the Exclude and the Headings multiselect fields.

The Exclude field lets you specify which pages or categories, if any, you wish to exclude from the generated menu tree.

The Headings field lets you specify which pages or categories, if any, you wish to display like headings, making them non clickable.

These two new fields, together with the Depth field introduced in Menubar 4.6, should offer you greater flexibility in building your page and category menus.

As usual, you can find the Menubar documentation and download links in the main menu of this site. Thank you for your interest in Menubar!

[Updated for the CSSmb_46 template]

CSS Menu Builder is an amazing website that offers a free online tool to build your CSS menus.

You can choose among a number of different backgrounds and menu images, and you can select colors and gradients for the inactive, hover and active status of your menu items.

With this information the online tool generates a stylesheet and a single .png image, packs both files in a convenient .zip archive and lets you quickly download it.

Interesting, isn’t it? And now you can apply a CSS Menu Builder style to Menubar, using the CSSmb_46 Menubar template. Let’s see how to do it. Read more…

This Menubar update brings you two new menu item types, Tag and TagList, and a new Depth field for the PageTree and CategoryTree types. To enable the Tag and TagList types with the Suckerfish, Superfish and iNove templates, you’ll need the last template version (Download).

The Tag type points to the tag archive specified in the Tag field.

The TagList type generates a menu sub-item for each tag archive, excluding the tags specified in the Exclude field. Please note that, while it’s possible to add sub-items to a TagList item, they will be ignored and won’t be displayed on your site!

The Depth field, applied to the PageTree and CategoryTree types, specifies how many levels deep the page or category tree will go; if you leave it blank you’ll get the whole tree.

The above improvements were all requested by readers, so I hope you’ll enjoy this new Menubar update!

With Menubar 4.5 you can optionally add icons to your menu items. You’ll need a new template like Suckerfish_45 to enable this feature, otherwise the Menubar admin page won’t display the field to enter the image URL.

I suggest you use PNG images of size 16×16 pixels (images of different size will be resized to 16×16) with a transparent background, so they will blend nicely with any menu background. I found the Silk Icons by famfamfam.com perfect for this purpose, I’ve used them on the WP Menubar demo site and you can see the result there.

Menubar 4.5 also fixes an issue with single and double quote characters being incorrectly escaped with a backslash in the former version.

Thanks to you all for your feedback, suggestions and bug reports, that are allowing me to improve Menubar with more features and less bugs!

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!