3 Replies Latest reply on May 20, 2006 6:16 PM by big_bozz

    NavigationPortlet enhancements

    vmarco

      I was not satisfied with the NavigationPortlet for displaying my tabs, so I wrote a new one. It allows users to specify two properties on pages named, "navbar.DisplayName" and "navbar.SortOrder". These are not required, but if included will override the name displayed on the tab and allow controlling the order of the tabs.

      I will eventually submit this Portlet to the community, but I also want to add handling vertical menus (aka. CatalogPortlet) in addition to the horizontal tabs now supported, as well as adding drop down menus for subpages. If you're interested in the portlet before its complete just drop me an email.

      Also, if you have comments on my approach, I'm all ears. I started this because I wanted my required "default" page to be named "Home" in the tabs, and I needed to control the order of the tabs. If there are other solutions to these problems please let me know as I may not be approaching JBoss Portal efficiently here. It seems to me that rather than requiring a page named "default" the design of JBossPortal should determine the default page through an XML attribute, and order should default to the order each page is defined in the XML descriptor.

      Cheers,
      Vince
      vmarco@mac.com

        • 1. Re: NavigationPortlet enhancements

          Thanks ! You spare me from having to write this ;)

          I started the tabbed nav very late in the 2.2 cycle so it didn't get very far.
          Some things I'd like to see in it are:
          * limit the amound of visible tabs ; add a paging mechanism for too many tabs to display
          * a bread crumb would be nice too

          From my experience: instead of trying to packa everything into one portlet, use a common code base, but several portlets (or render utils) for specific incarnations like tree vs list, vs popup , etc. I found too many config options for the same portlet to be confusing.

          • 2. Re: NavigationPortlet enhancements
            sitongia

            I was about to report that when there are many tabs, they wrap onto a new line, which messes up the header graphic, but then I saw this thread.

            When will a new tabbed nav portlet be available?

            Thanks,
            ==Leonard

            • 3. Re: NavigationPortlet enhancements
              big_bozz

              *bump*

              Any news on the development of the enhanced NavigtionPortlet?