Navigatioin control enhancements for 4.2

Good day to you all

Frist finding the roadmap is once again impossible for me using the site navigation. I think I am not seeing the forrest because off all the trees.

How to you find http://www.sitefinity.com/asp-net-cms-features/roadmap.aspx?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=sm&utm_campaign=buzz

the normal way

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Secondly

I sure hope the Navigation controls gets a boost from what it is now.

1) Vertical Menu with Sub (unless I am missing it somewhere now)
2) PanelBar

Those are two things that simply should be available in 4.2

Markus

Any one on this?

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I assume that every one of you will have custom skins for the navigation. At the moment it looks like we need skins for RadMenu, RadTabStrip, RadTreeView - Am I the only one having a hard time with stylebuilder.telerik.com?

How do you guy go about creating your skins?

Markus

Marcus,
look through this forum post: http://www.sitefinity.com/devnet/forums/sitefinity-4-x/bugs-issues/sitemap-issues.aspx

It should give you some information on using the RadPanelBar for sub-menu navigation. There are two solutions in there. One is from Boyan, and the other is one that I was able to put together.

Hi  Markus,

That's a tough one -  two types of navigation that you mentioned are not included in our plans for Sitefinity  4.2 
However, I will start an internal discussion about this. Indeed creating custom navigation with PanleBar is not that hard to achieve, you might take a look at the provided samples by me and Richard, and also at the sample video Radoslav sent you in the support thread you had opened about PanelBar and SiteMapDataSource. Can you share a little bit more about the request concerning vertical menu with sub pages - I believe we can provide some workaround there as well.
Concerning customizing the Navigation with our Visual Style Builder can you, please, try setting a couple of classes in a CSS widget placed on your page and then reference them in the Navigation control - I have tested it myself and it works fine. If the functionality demanded is different, please write back.


Regards,
Boyan Barnev
the Telerik team

Dear Boyan

Thanks for your replay.

a) I know that everything can be programmed - yet I don't want to have to programm a menu like I have on my site www.marktold.com on the side every time something comes up.

I simply think that a top menu with droping menus could be about a comon scenario as a menu on the left with flyouts to the right.

b) about it is not hard to achieve. Have you ever ridden a bike with only one wheel. It's impossible. If you ask my doughter she will tell you its very easy. Because she knows how to do it. I for one was not able to find the right reference to see what the URLFiled TextField or IDs content should be - so this will be absolutely a nogo for any enduser to drag a datasitemap and a radcontrol to the template and go from there.

Horizontal RadMenu out of the box
Veritkal RadMenu not possible??

c) Stylebuilder simply does not like me. Thats my conclusion. More then once I have set a border color and for hover item for example, went to Item and back to hover item and the color was not saved. I would assume that I dont have to hit save every time. I have a ticket open on which you can see that I have (after up- and donwloading a skin.zip a couple of times) double entries and strange stuff you would not want in your css.

d) In the same ticket you see that somehow I think SF is still trying to style my RadMenu.

Fazit

- RadMenu Vertical is simply a must
- PanalBar is a very very nice to have feature

- Stylebuilder hates me, and the styles of the menus are so complex that if you build a custom radmenu skin once a year you grow a beard from start to finish (this is if you are a man :-))

Regard Markus

Hi Markus,

I understand the frustration customizing stuff might be causing, but that's why we're here trying to help each other in the forums. Besides initiating an internal discussion, like I've mentioned in my previous post, I can try helping you with several things that come to the top of my mind.
First, concerning vertical RadMenu with page flyouts - like the one you currently have on the mentioned website - please try this sample solution:
Create a new Web User Control (e.g. TwoLevel.ascx) in a folder /MyControls in the root of your Sitefinity project. Open TwoLevel.ascx and paste the following line of code in it:

I am not sure if I have made this suggestion before.

I would be happy if Telerik would take the Navigatin control appart and have seperate Navigation Widgets.

TapStrip
Menu
TreeView
Sitemap
or all others

I just ran into another (very very very small problem)

I have a simple Horizontal Navigation from the Navigtain widget. I have set my own Wrapper CSS class (Skin) which all works fine.

I am trying to optimize SF in the aspects of speed in any possible was. I noticed that the base TabStrip CSS will still be transmitted even though I am not needing them in since I use my own skin.

In order to avoid this I would have to make my own template and set EnableEmbeddeBaseStylesheets and EnabledEmbeddedSkins to false (thanks Katia)

However I would like to keep SF as core as possible but still would love to see SF perform in the best possible ways.

Solutions
a) Break the navigation Widgets appart which would probably give you more advanced options
b) New NavigationWidgets like PanelBar could be more easly added by telerik because less UI stuff to handle (or it could be handled seperately)
c) Maybe it would make sense that if you set your own SKIN that SF sets the EnableEmbeddeBaseStylesheets and EnabledEmbeddedSkins to false automatically.

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Again it would only save bytes but a lot of small improvments can make a big difference as well.

Markus