I’ve written several plugins for Word Press for my own use and this is the first one that I’ve decided to share. This is a practical approach to reusability and ease of construction for one of the most important features of any web site… the navigation list.
Announcement – (September 6th, 2007)
Please use the Forum for questions, comments, etc. Comments for this post are closed.
- Thanks -
Version 95.37 (July 17, 2007)
I haven’t done this very often – added a category while posting… so that may explain how I missed this one. Mark from braincast.nl asked me about it and sure enough I had missed this one. I’ve added support for the “on-the-fly” addition of categories from the write post page. In addition, you can (from the NAVT List page) specify which of your navigation groups these “on-the-fly” categories belong to; this the “default navigation list” that now appears as an option on the NAVT List page.
Widgets
I moved the NAVT Companion Widget code inside the NAVT code base to eliminate the need to do a separate plugin activation for just the widget. Now that WordPress comes with built-in widget support, I didn’t see the need to keep the NAVT widget code as a stand alone script. As a result, the NAVT Companion widget no longer appears in the list of plugins but it’s there as of this release and you will find the widgets at the bottom of your widgets page as before.
WordPress MU
It has come to my attention that the NAVT plugin isn’t compatible with WordPress MU… I didn’t realize there was anything different about the way plugins were integrated in MU. I plan to take a look at this and make it available for MU users that are missing out on this plugin.
Navigation Item Hierarchies
Many have asked about this and I do plan on doing it but probably not the way people are expecting it to be implemented. I have a very good approach to this idea but it means finding the time and making quite a few changes. The biggest changes I expect to be in the Drag ‘n Drop GUI – I need to do a little experimentation first to see how to go about implementing a hierarchical representation in the page. I’m not working with a great deal of ‘real estate’. I promise I will get to this soon.
Version 95.36 (July 12, 2007)
This version has a couple of fixes:
- Login/Registration Navigation item URL was not formed correctly if you had installed WordPress in a directory other than the root directory
- Removed the alphanumeric restriction for Menu Alias names and Plain Text Divider names. You should be able to put in there just about anything
Yet Another Update (June 23, 2007)
Release version 95.35 is available for download.
Broken NAVT Widgets have been fixed – NAVT widgets are now only compatible with WordPress 2.2.1
Update (June 14, 2007)
Release version 95.32 is available for download.
Found a little problem and hopefully I’ve fixed it. If a page or category title contained any markup characters like < , > or &, they confused the XML parser to the point where the wheels just fell off…
A special thanks to Rich Leino (websitemaven) for reporting the problem and giving me access to his WordPress web site to debug it.
Update (June 10, 2007)
Release version 95.30 is available for download.
- There are now five instances of the WordPress NAVT Widget for multiple Navigation Group support
- Navigation items can be made ‘private’ making them unavailable until the user logs in
- Multiple dropdown menus can be generated from a single navigation group
- Form fields added to the Manage Pages and Manage Category screens making it possible to edit/change navigation group assignment for items.
- New icons for private and draft status.
- Draft pages can be assigned to a group but will not be displayed until published
- Pages can be made ‘private’ from the NAVT List page
- Entire navigation lists can be expanded and collapsed
- Completely rewritten JavaScript support.
- Tested with WordPress 2.2 and native WordPress Widget support.
Update (April 23rd, 2007)
A new “How To” guide explaining you how to modify your theme is available in the Looking For Help? section below.
What Is It?
Simply stated, the Navigation Tool For Word Press (NAVT) plugin is designed to provide you with complete control over the contents of your Word Press navigation links.
- One or more lists can be created from any combination of pages, categories, external links and dividers.
- Items within a list can be arranged in any arbitrary order.
- List item names can be displayed using an alias name so that menu item names fit in your menu tabs.
- Navigation lists are theme ‘independent’ and are reusable from theme to theme.
- Create multiple navbars and sidebar menus.
- Provides ample class information for styling your navigation lists.
- Plugin administration page provides a Drag ‘n’ Drop Interface to minimize keyboard use.
- Comprehensive built-in help.
- Plugin administration page allows you to remove plugin database information prior to uninstalling the plugin.
- Comes with companion sidebar module and sidebar widget for widgetized themes.
For the programmer, the plugin provides a single interface function similar to the WordPress function `wp_list_pages`. The interface routine returns a HTML formatted unnumbered list containing the category and/or page items configured within a user defined list called Navigation Group.
For the non-programmer, the plugin comes with a companion sidebar module and sidebar widget that can be incorporated into your widgetized theme.
Planned Improvements
- Multi-language support (currently English only)
- Level hierarchies
Drop down navigation lists- Key accessibility
Compatibility Testing
This plugin and companion sidebar module have been tested with:
- IE6, IE7, Opera Version 9.10 and Firefox Version 2.0+ (PC only). (IE5 is not supported)
- Sidebar Module Plugin Version 1.0 and higher.
- Word Press 2.1+ and higher (only)
- WordPress Widgets Plugin for WordPress version 2.1
- WordPress version 2.2 with native Widget support
Unfortunately, I don’t own a MAC and nor do I have access to one. If you own a MAC and the plugin appears to work then please let me know and I’ll add it to this list. Be sure to give me the browser and version information.
License and Warranty
This plugin is licensed under the MIT-License and is provided “AS IS” without warranty of any kind. Please refer to the MIT-License for details. Because the plugin is licensed free of charge for personal and commercial use, I do not accept any responsibility for any damages, direct or indirect, that may arise from using the plugin. Every effort has been made to make sure the plugin is free of defects.
Support
Say it on here or say it there… Ask questions, report problems, make comments.
How Do I Install It?
Download the latest version of the plugin
(Kindly Hosted By the WordPress Plugin Web Site)
- Unzip the file in `/wp-content/plugins/` directory. The plugin resides in its own directory.
- Activate the NAVT plugin.
- After activation, go to the `Manage` menu and select the menu tab NAVT Lists to use the plugin.
- The built-in help guide is located on the NAVT Lists page.
Documentation
In addition to the built-in user guide that is accessible from the NAVT admin page, the plugin’s doc directory contains a manual explaining the PHP interface function call syntax.
A similar file is provided in the plugin ‘modules’ directory explaining where to copy the navt_module.php sidebar module if you use the SideBar Module Plugin for Word Press written by Ben Sherratt.
The document also explains how to install and use the WordPress compatible widget.
Looking for Help?
I’ve written a document that is available here for anyone that needs help modifying their theme. This document is a short tutorial on WordPress themes, explains how to determine where you should add the NAVT interface call and how to correctly add the function call to your theme. I also plan to write a help and tips document on styling the lists produced by the NAVT Plugin.
Upgrading from versions 94rc-X to .95.1
The size of the data saved to the database options area was increased for each navigation item in .95.1. Therefore the data created by previous versions is incompatible with the latest one. After upgrading to .95.1, go to the NAVT Admin page (from the plugin page) and click the “Remove Data” button to reset the data. Then go to the NAVT Lists from the Manage menu to recreate your navigation lists.
Previous Versions
I don’t recommend it but here are a few of the previous versions of the NAVT plugin. Prior to .95.1, these versions exhibited issues with some non-English keyboard characters, specifically UTF-8 multi-byte character encoding. The issue was fixed in v.95.1.
Hi There. This seems to be a really great plugin but I haven’t fully achieved yet what I wanted. Maybe you can help. And believe me I went through all the help files and pages several times.
I’ve just installed the NAVT plug-in order to produce a nice horizontal dropdown in my header. It works all smoothly up to the point that I can load my NAVT navigation group into the header. The problems starts, when I want them to drop-down. NAVT offers me an option called “dropdown-style”. That works but it only results in an ugly select box. I want a smooth dropdown. I tried to work it out with style sheets but I do not get it working. As far as I know in order to produce a dropdown via stylesheets you need the visible menu item in an unordered list (ul) and the items that drop down have to be in a secondary list (li). NAVT presents all navi items in one ordered list (li). Could it be that I’ve got something fundamentally wrong here? Can anyone help?
your plugin is just great. It works perfectly but i would like to knwo how can i add more than 5 NAVT Widget categories ?
I hope hearing from you soon.
regards.
Thank you for the NAVT plugin, it’s brilliant for sidebar lists. The only problem I have is that I can’t use any more than one single word as a name for any NAV group. For example, I want to call one list of links ‘Best of’ or Most popular’ but get the message ‘Invalid title’. If I use ‘Best’ or ‘Popular’ there is no problem. Am I doing something wrong or is this how the plugin works? Must I stick with single word titles?
Im using NAVT with widgets. Best thing that ever happened to me
Is there a way to add “nofollow” to links?
Hey,
Thanks for a great plugin!
I am getting one bad error though, when i change settings like private on some page and update i get the following error:
WordPress database error: [You have an error in your SQL syntax; check the manual that corresponds to your MySQL server version for the right syntax to use near ‘d better have your …
To me it seems like the ‘ is telling your plugin that there is no more content, but there is. I get alot of these errors and things aren’t becoming private since i get them
Hi again,
Sorry I didn’t look hard enough. I found it at
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/wordpress-navigation-list-plugin-navt/download/
For your information, 95.36 returned the same error message as well.
But version 95.35-r1.3 was successfully installed.
Thanks
Hi,
My PC crashed and I had to redo everything.
And as some other people are mentioning it here I too get the “Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.� when installing to 2.2.1 (Japanese version).
But the strange part is that I had it working before. Could it be because of the newest version 95.37?
To confirm, I would like to try version 95.36. Could you point me to where I can download 95.36 please.
Thanks.
I’m a little confused as to how this works. I create my groups fine, assign them to a group, but no matter what I do – every page simply displays the default group (sans a link to itself). for instance, I made a contact group and added an address, phone and email so that on my contact page you’d see those 3 options. Instead, it just shows my default group, sans a link to the contact page. Hope that makes sense.
Hi,
is it possible to make something like this:
Group name 1
- menu item 1
- menu item 2
- menu item 3
– menu item 4
– menu item 5
- menu item 6
I created pages, two of them have “parent page” Menu item 3.
ps. great plugin, thx
Have wordpress 2.2.1 fresh installed.
When trying to activate the plugin the following error comes:
“Plugin could not be activated because it triggered a fatal error.”
any idea?
thanks in advance
John, If you have a very large list of pages, categories, etc. it could conceivably take a bit of time to initially build the display page. The only other lengthy operation is saving the navigation information on the server. I’ve been toying with the idea of reading and writing to a cache for quicker access.
I never anticipated that people would manage sidebar or top bad navigation items that frequently. Typically, once the navigation information is setup on your site, it doesn’t normally change that often.
Try using a cache plugin or take a look at the amount of disk space you have available for your browser cache.
Hi Grinch: Something has been bothering me. I use several NAVT lists, each of which has 10 or so items. I’ve been noticing that each time I go to Site Admin -> Manage -> NAVT Lists, the page is taking a very long time to load, and it takes a long time to make changes. This doesn’t happen managing any other non-NAVT WP functions. Any thoughts on this issue?
I noticed that when marking an item private it also changes the page to a private status. Reading the help page I thought I could create a page that could only be viewed by people that were logged in, but when both are private subscribers just get a 404 error.
I got the NAVT plugin working. Great!
Thank you
Philip
Thank you for great plugin. I am not familiar with coding and I was able to play with this plug in for 7 days with a lot of googlings. For now, it works to the point that I can create group and menu items.
I would like to know the procedure to put these groups into the front page on the side bar.
Please help
Philip
navt plug in needs a scrollbar in css or in plug in. I am not able to see the full number of items in my nav list.
hi, sorry for my english, i’m german;)
this is a fantastic plugin for Wordpress!
i create a new website with wordpress as CMS, but the new website had more languages (german, english) and i use the gengo plugin for language-switch in this site.
here my question:
can i combine NAVT with gengo?
did that make already times someone or do you have perhaps an idea?
thanks
gengo: http://wp-multilingual.net/download-gengo/template-functions/en/
Thanks for emailing me great detailed info offline!
Hi,
This is a great plugin! Something I’ve been looking for.
But, being a newbee to all of this sort of things I haven’t been able to get this working as I want it to.
I’ve trying to place the navigation group into my ‘box’ without any success.
Pls check out my web site (just stared WP and customization) where when you click onto the ‘briefcase icon’ in dock menu at the top of the page a ‘box’ will slide open. And that’s where I’m trying to put my category lists.
Being just a simple copy & paste guy, I can’t figure out what kind of code to put in. I’ve gone through all your readme and online help documents but just can’t get it right.
Could you help me please.
Thank you.
I create Wordpress blogs for clients and love this plugin. The drag and drop is now working great. I have trouble though with this plugin breaking themes. Can you put together a list of compatible themes? And more extensive documentation on how to fix themes to make them work with NAVT? Here are two themes that break – Subtle at http://www.gluedideas.com/ and Light at http://vaguedream.com/wordpress-themes (even when changing CSS from ‘navigation’ to ‘menu’).
It works it works! I was still having problems making the plugin work with my WP install not being at the root level of the domain. After repairing my tables, uninstalling a few unneeded plugins, and reactivating the plugin, it appears that it all works!
One thing I did notice is that the link to the manage page from the navt uninstall page still links to the location of the page if WP were installed at the top level of the domain. Not a big deal at all, but I thought I’d mention it.
Thanks for the amazing plugin! I can’t wait to see this as a standard part of WP!
In response to Shawn C, I’ve added this to the next release. You’ll be able to indicate whether or not the link title (aka tooltip) that is displayed when the mouse hovers over the link is to be the Cateogory Description instead of the menu alias or category title.
The next release also contains something called “Photo Bullets”. I’ll explain how it works and provide examples on how they are used in your navigation list.
Hi. Great plugin, thanks for your hard work!
One question: How might I go about changing the tooltip text that appears when a visitor hovers on a category link that is part of one of my Navigation Groups? Currently it displays the ORIGINAL name for that category when it was first created in Wordpress. I would like for it to display the category’s DESCRIPTION instead.
Thanks in advance.
Hi. Great plugin!!!!
Just installed the new version today (95.37).
Updated to wordpress 2.2.1 and gets a problem with adding items to the group. The group is created ok but I can’t ad items to it. In IE7 I get the “forbidden” sign and in Safari it just wont change color (have been moving it back and fort like 20 times…slowly). Any clue of what I’m doing wrong?
hi, sorry for my english, i’m french and I did not practice english since school, lol…
I have a problem running NAVT plugin for the first time with a new install of Wordpress. In the admin panel, my unassigned column is separate in two column (the other has no title but the option menu) and when I apply some modification on my menus… all the pages and categories appear twice in this “part of unassigned” column… I apply again and all appear three times in the column and again and again.
But I used your plugin on an another and I want congratulating you for this. thx
In case anyone is wondering… most of these comments I answer directly via email. I don’t want people to think that no one pays any attention to them because you don’t see a response from me on this post…
Thank you for the fantastic plug-in. Without this plug-in, navigation would be a nightmare.
Thank you.
p/s: Do you need webhosting sponsorship, if yes, drop me an email. Thank you.
Great plugin!
I just have one question… maybe I just don’t see it but new categories are not added to the unassigned box for me to add to my leftnav menu…
I created several new categories while posting new content, I cannot add those… I created a new category and assigned it to my leftnav menu… nothing there…
What could be wrong? Any pointers will be helpfull… (I am a php programmer so tech info will be helpfull as well!
I was talking about something like this: http://navyroad.com/wordpress-plugins/nrs-folding-pages-widget/
basically you could take this plugin: http://www.webspaceworks.com/resources/wordpress/30/ and try to incorporate its functions into your plugin like it is described here: http://www.webspaceworks.com/resources/wordpress/67/
Meaning if you have a page in a menu created with NAVT, and click on it, it will display all its subpages below the selected page, maybe even highlight the selected ones so it is clear to the visitors where exactly they are located…
hello,
can you make this compatible with the foldable pages plugin?
I have seen some plugins which are compatible, for example the king widgets are => he has a king pages widget that has a checkbox, saying, use foldable pages plugin, so you can chose to use that or not.
basically this enables collapsible sidebar, meaning if you click on a menu item that has subpages or subcategories, the menu will fold and display those children in the menu too.
what do you think of this? if you are interested I can provide you with links to all plugins I mentioned.
Hi, is this compatible with Wordpress MU? I’m using v1.2.3, and I’m getting “The plugin cannot be loaded because of a fatal error” message, so I want to see if it’s my installation or if it’s incompatible.
Thanks!
David
i agree with the above comment. I write in spanish at i cant add accents or ñ
hope you can add that feature on the next release.
also, a prefix for lists items would be nice.
i use the » arrows before each item, it’d be nice to be able to add them trough this plugin
Hi.
Why is only alphanumeric characters allowed for the item menu alias? I want to use other characters like ‘.’, ‘&’, ‘ ‘, ‘-’ etc…
Hi, this is a great Addon, but i have a problem
I creat a new group, but i dont get any group in the “NAVT Lists”
The group works great, but they arent in the list and so not on my Page
Is there a fix soon?
NAVT v.95.35 im using
hello,
i am using a local server to style my new theme. in wich location are the options of navt stored for exporting them to my webserver?
thanks for help.
is anyone else having problems with using the plugin on sites that aren’t hosted at the top-level of the domain? (mine is at http://examplesite.com/~username/) my problem is i can’t create new navigation groups.
This plugin is truly el-neato. Thank you!
just did the WP upgrade to 2.2.1 and the plug-in died. I can work with it in the control panel but the widgets don’t show up on the websites sidebar
This plugin doesn’t seem to be compatible with WP 2.1.3. According to Firebug, it two Javascript errors. I can’t move to WP 2.2 yet as I use SMB heavily in my site. Any chance for a fix?
Steve
I just upgraded to WP 2.2 and it solved my problem, hooray! Now I am able to create nav groups. whew.
thanks,
pq