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Today I’ve released Menubar version 3.6. There are no new features in this version, but I’ve improved the first installation procedure adding more user-friendly messages.

This will be helpful for new users, or when you install the plugin on a new site.

Enjoy!

In 2007 MODx won the “Most Promising Open Source CMS” Packt Award. A little more than one year later, the MODx Web Development book has been published, to fulfill the expectations of many interested readers.

MODx Web Development is the first book available on MODx, and will undoubtedly contribute to spread the knowledge of this emerging CMS. Once again, Packt Publishing does a great job promoting Open Source Software, and MODx especially deserves such a promotion.

But let’s have a look at the book itself. The author, Antano Solar John, is active in the field of consulting, education and training, and the intended audience of the book are readers new to MODx or less experienced with this platform. But even advanced MODx users will find something interesting, especially in the last chapters.

After explaining how to install MODx, the book proceeds to present Documents and Containers (the basic elements of a MODx site) and templating (the way to style those elements according to our preferences and needs).
Each concept is presented without assuming any prior knowledge of site development, with many step by step examples.

After the basics are covered, the author introduces more advanced features, like authentication and authorization of users. This chapter is available for all to read in Sample Chapter 5, and is a good sample of the clarity of the whole book.

Next comes the explanation of snippets, powerful tools to enhance our MODx site. Two important built-in snippets are presented: Ditto, which enables content aggregation (including tagging and feeds), and Wayfinder, which builds a variety of document lists, useful for instance to build navigation menus. Many more MODx snippets are available, whether in the MODx package or as a separate download, and we learn how to search for the snippets we need, and how to install and use them.

The last chapters put the finishing touch on our MODx learning journey, and are probably more interesting for advanced users, since they discuss the PHx notation, ways to integrate forums or image galleries, and finally creating snippets, plugins and modules. Search Engine Optimization and Security are also covered.

Conclusions? Well, given the clarity of MODx Web Development and the features of MODx I’m really thinking about developing a MODx site myself!

Menubar 3.5, released today, automatically adds the Menubar widget to your widget list. This new widget lets you display your menus in any widget-ready area of your theme, in a sidebar for instance, improving the flexibility of your menu placement.

The widget configuration form has two input fields, Title and Menu name. Title is the optional widget title, while Menu name specifies the menu you wish to display in that widget instance.

As usual, the template and optional CSS to use with a menu are specified in the Menubar plugin admin page, where you create and edit menus. If you wish to display a menu in a sidebar, many of the available templates are not suitable, because their style doesn’t fit well with the sidebar style. In this case try using the template Suckerfish without CSS to get your desired result.

The Menubar widget has been implemented using the new WP_Widget class introduced in WordPress 2.8, so if you are using a previous WordPress version the creation of the Menubar widget will be silently skipped.

You can download Menubar 3.5 from the WordPress Plugin Directory, while the documentation is in WP Menubar documentation.

Enjoy your Menubar widgets!

This new Menubar version improves the compatibility with qTranslate, a plugin that offers an easy to use interface for managing a multilingual web site.

After you install and activate qTranslate, you can enable the translation of your menu items inserting in the Name field the relevant translation tags. For instance, instead of News, you can write

<!--:en-->News<!--:--><!--:it-->Notizie<!--:-->

In the same way, if you wish to translate a menu item tooltip, you have to insert in the Attributes field the following text

title="<!--:en-->News<!--:--><!--:it-->Notizie<!--:-->"

As always you can download Menubar 3.4 from the WordPress Plugin Directory, and you can find the documentation in WP Menubar documentation.

Many thanks to you all, and a special thank you to Fabio, for testing Menubar 3.4 on his multilingual site Le Strane Felci.

I’ve just released Menubar 3.3 to correct two bugs.

The first bug was related to menu names containing spaces or other special characters. Since the menu name was used to build the JavaScript function needed by IE to make Suckerfish work, that resulted in Suckerfish not working in IE. Now I’m using a numerical menu id instead of the menu name for that purpose. Thanks to Albert for reporting this bug!

The second bug was related to the new menu reordering functions introduced in version 3.2. In a very special case your request to move a menu item was simply ignored, now that special case is working as well.

Thank you for supporting Menubar by reporting bugs or suggesting features, and enjoy this new version!