Comments on: Review of WordPress Menus User Interface

By: iamronen

iamronen — Sun, 08 Aug 2010 05:41:55 +0000

Hello Ash,

I apologize for the late reply – for some reason your comment was flagged as potential spam in the Akismet queue – which is a first for me.

As I said before, I think that the new management is a great starting point – but needs much more work to be pleasant and useful. It is my number one tool of choice for creating navigation elements (that end-users can continue to modify on their own). There have been some interesting side effects to this:

I've been able to drop a bunch of widget plugins I was manipulating to get similar results
I don't need to use or teach end-users to use page order – which always was a pain in the ass to use.
I do need to get users to understand the difference between menus and widgets – which is a new and challenging teaching hurdle
I still use parent-page settings to indicate site structure information that I need for proper theme behavior (see Thections- though that doesn't and often times shouldn't carry over to nav-menus

WordPress is feature bloated and I doubt that will change anytime soon (for many reasons). I've long been wishing for an opportunity to create a simplified version of it. If you know of a good Plugin developer who wants to put some effort into this – I have some ideas (some of them are here) on how this can be achieved.

By: Ash

Ash — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 12:35:56 +0000

I agree. The new menu management system isn't really good for larger sites. I also hate the fact that it doesn't work with the existing wordpress navmenu management options (Parent page drop down and order on the page edit screen). At the very least these options should be auto hidden if a theme declares support for the new nav menu system. Otherwise its confusing to have a navigation system that has no effect.

By: iamronen

iamronen — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 13:19:40 +0000

Thanks for your input jared

Menus are a great beginning. Their design is OK (still not great) for simple sites with one or two menus. On larger & more complex sites – they are still very useful but very unplesant to use. I hope they continue to improve.

By: jaredwilli

jaredwilli — Sun, 18 Jul 2010 07:57:52 +0000

I think this or something to this effect would be great for improving the menus. I too have found the same issues you have mentioned, and on one site I currently have 4 custom post types and 4 taxonomies, with plans for more of both too. So you can imagine how long the page gets if I were to open them all up.

I've also found that if you have a reeeally long list of child menu items, say you add a whole list of all the terms of a tax for instance, they are all randomly added, in no particular list. And when the list is longer than the page, you have to scroll to find them, and if you want to put one of the last ones at the top of the menu, well scrolling while dragging is not only slooow but also very hard and annoying with a mousepad.

There are definite needs for looking more into making the system better in many ways. This is a good start you have.