Menu

Lets turn our attention to the main menu in Habari. As I mentioned before there has to be a better way than the current method. The reasoning for the current menu is simple, once you start adding all the menu items (including those provided by the various plugin) the list becoming very long indeed. Without any plugin menus this is what is currently there (including one of the expanded menu version): menu.png

And here’s that menu with one of the side menus popping out: menu_side.png

From my personal use, I only need 8 menu items in total:

  1. New Entry

  2. New Page

  3. Manage

  4. Comments

  5. Dashboard

  6. Plugins

  7. Options

  8. Logout

For me everything else is completely superflous, or at least it’s bloody rare for me to even go there, like once a year if that (I don’t think I’ve ever gone to the logs and groups menu for example). As I said that’s only because of the way I choose to use Habari. Other users might feel like they want something a bit different, and this type of functionality would allow

Proposal

The Menu plugin would allow you (in the options page) to hide all the menu items, spare the Dashboard, Options and Logout menu items (for obvious reasons). From then on, it's open season for you to configure your drop down menu as you wish. This would reduce the need for side menus to pop out. It would also empower the user to customise the menu which would in turn hopefully streamline the workflow, your route from A to B.

The other aspect of this Menu plugin that would also hopefully enhance the experience, would be bringing the shortcut numbers back. In the options menu we would also provide an option to assign the menu option with a keyboard shortcut to a menu item. This way we’d get back to a more streamlined workflow, which is slightly hindered by an additional keyboard stroke (at least in my eyes it is).

new_menu.png

Future Details

While talking with Michael on #irc about the above, one of the things that he brought forward is maybe having an option to expand all the menu items by double clicking 'Q' or something like that, which I think is an excellent idea. Also in the options menu apart from just a quick tickbox to see whether or not you want the menu item to be shown or not we might also be able to provide the option to rearrange the menu itself, thus providing further customisation, enhancing elegance.