Menu Editor

  • The Menu Editor allows you to customize the menus that are available on your site. You can change current menus or create new ones to use on any page of your site.

    Adding a Menu Item

    Adding a Menu Item to an existing menu is an incredibly powerful tool. For example, if you followed the tutorial Creating a New Page, you may want to add a link to your new page in the main menu. Follow the steps below to add a Menu Item.

    1. Navigate to Appearance > Menu Editor in your Admin panel. 

    2.  At the top, you'll see a select box next to the word "Editing:". This select box contains a list of all Menus on the site available for editing. Select the Menu that you would like to edit from the drop down list that opens when you click on the arrow button of the select box. For example, if you want to edit the main menu, select "Main Navigation Menu"

    3. Click the "Add Item" link to open the “Create Menu Item” popup.

    4. You will see several different fields in the “Create Menu Item” popup.

      Label

      The Label input is where you put the name for your Menu Item.This will be visible on the front end Menu. Our Menu for this tutorial is named “Boutique” and we will also link it to “Classifieds” in the next step.

      URL

      The URL input should contain the URL to the page you want the Menu Item to direct to. For an Internal URL (yoursite.com), the URL should only be the URL to the page minus your domain. For example if you wanted to create a Menu that would take you directly to the page that allows you to upload an image to your Photo Albums plugin, you would type in "albums/upload" and NOT "http://yoursitename.com/albums/upload". For our example, we are linking to our “Classifieds” page.

      If you want to link to an external URL (someothersite.com), you would put the full URL in the input field.

      Icon

      The Icon input allows you to specify an icon to go next to your Menu Item in the Menu. Note that not all Menus support this. For example, the Main Navigation Menu does not support icons, however the Member Profile Options Menu does. Any Menu that has not been supplied by default will not allow icons. If you would like to add your own icon to a Menu, then you will need to put the URL without your domain in this field or see tutorial for how to use font-awesome icons. For example, if you are using the File & Media Manager to upload your example.jpg file. You can see that it's located in /public/admin/example.jpg. To use this icon you will need to add "public/admin/example.jpg" to the URL field just like the previous URL field.

      Open in a new window?

      The "Open in a new window?" checkbox allows you to decide whether you want the Menu Item to open the page in a new window or open the page in the current window. If the checkbox is selected, when clicking on the Menu Item the page specified in the URL above will be opened in a new internet browser window. If you do not select this check box, the page will be opened in the same window the Menu Item is located on.

      Enabled?

      The "Enabled?" checkbox allows you to decide whether you want the Menu enabled (visible) or not. If the checkbox is checked, then the item will be displayed when a page containing the Menu is displayed. Not checking the checkbox will hide the Menu from the public but will save your settings in case you might want to use that Menu Item again in the future.

    5. Lastly, hit "Create Menu Item" to save your new Menu Item. If you checked the "enabled" box, your Menu Item should now be visible in the Menu you have added it to.

    Adding a Menu with Submenu (Drop Down Menus)

    1. You'll first need the parent menu created. Follow steps one through three above. 

    2. For the URL, as this won't have an URL since it will have submenus, enter 

      javascript:void(0)

      and fill in the rest of the input fields as you want them. Click Create Menu  Item once done.

    3. To add the submenus, click "Add Submenu" to the right of your new menu.

    4. Fill in the submenu fields as you need them and click to Create Submenu.

    Editing a Menu Item

    Editing a Menu Item is easy once you understand how to add a Menu Item. You can edit both custom and standard Menu Items by clicking the "edit" link next to the Menu Item you want to change. The same popup as in step 4 above will show and you can edit any of the fields.

    Note that for the standard Menu Items that come with SocialEngine, the URL option cannot be modified. What do you do if you want the "Forum" Menu in your main Menu to direct to a different place than the SocialEngine Forum plugin? Simply edit the "Forum" menu item and uncheck the "enabled" checkbox so that the Menu is no longer visible. 

    Then, create a new Menu Item using the method outlined above, labeling the item "Forum" and specifying the URL you want the item to direct to instead.

    Re-Ordering Menus

    Re-ordering the Menu Items within a Menu is a simple matter of dragging and dropping the item you want to move above or below the other items.

    Deleting/Disabling a Menu Item

    If you have created a custom Menu Item that you no longer want, you can simply click the "delete" link next to the Menu Item to remove it.

    If you'd like to keep the Menu Item to work on later, or if you want to get rid of a standard SocialEngine Menu Item (which can't be deleted), you'll need to disable the Menu Item. To do this, click the "edit" link on the Menu Item, and uncheck the "enabled" checkbox in the popup as shown in the “Editing a Menu” section above.

    Creating a New Menu

    When styling your site, you may find that you want to create a new Menu. For example, you might want to have a side-bar Menu that points to other parts of your site. In this case, you'll need to create a new Menu. Start by clicking the "Add Menu" link in your Menu Editor.

    You should then see a popup like this: 

    Give your Menu a title that will help you identify it later. This title will not be visible to anyone but you. After you save the Menu, you will be taken to the Menu editing page. Here, you can follow the instructions above for creating a new Menu Item to add new options to your Menu.

    For placing a Menu on your site, please see the Layout Editor page.