One of the frustrations I’ve experienced with Wordpress is the apparent lack of themes that deal with the page and category hierarchies in a traditional navigation menu style.  By that I mean, a navbar presents the highest level of the page hierarchy, and hovering over a high level page presents the user with a drawer of the next level, with  successive hovers presenting successive levels.  This is a typical Windows (TM) hierarchical fly-out menu scheme, and I find it very easy to navigate using it.  So I’ve started altering my theme to present my page and category hierarchy using such a menuing scheme.

The script I’ve chosen to do it comes from the Adobe Spry framework.  It’s a beautifully simple framework, based almost entirely around the html that is present in a page.  Though I would consider myself to be a javascript expert, I take no pleasure in having to think too hard about how to accomplish the look and feel I’m after.  Spry makes it relatively easy to implement advanced functionality on a website, and so I’m going to use it.

I may just continue “Spry-ifying” my theme.  There are tons of widgets, content containers, navigation aids, effects, and such, along with a robust ajax framework.  Who knows where it’ll go?  But for now, you can see the very beginning of my efforts in the “Pages” section of my right sidebar.  It’s only barely functional right now, but hey, it’s a start.  Next, I move it to the header and make it horizontal.  Add some style rules for the elements, and do the same for the “Categories” set (which will appear in the menu as just another high-level branch in the page tree), and I’ll be happy as fuzz on a peach.

This capability is one of the main ones I need to begin using Wordpress as a CMS for sites that I create for friends/relatives/clients.  Most of them want a familiar navigation paradigm, which is the Windows (TM) menubar that’s found across the top of virtually every program that they use.  To this point, I haven’t been able to offer them that, and so Wordpress hasn’t been the solution, as rich and beautiful as it is for almost everything else a website needs.

So there’s one barrier to using Wordpress as my premier CMS solution that’s been removed.  The other one is that I need to learn how to use page templates.  I know the capability is there, to have multiple layouts and apply one of them to any particular page.  I just haven’t done it yet.  After the menus are to my satisfaction, that’s next.  After that… I have a few websites to convert!