User:Jon Harald Søby/Dynamic menus/en

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Screenshot of the article no:Namibias historie, showing how the layout looks with no menus opened. The orange bar to the left is the interwiki links – they become visible when it is hovered.
Screenshot of the article no:Namibias historie, showing how the layout looks with the Navigation menu opened.

Dynamic menus is a gadget I wrote because I wanted a more condensed MediaWiki skin that focuses 100 % on the content. All of the menus have been moved from the sidebar to the top of the page, where they are dropdowns; this means that you hover a menu headline to see the actual menu. Virtually all of the interface surrounding articles has been moved to the top 60 pixels of the page – freeing the rest for the content. The gadget is an extension of the Modern skin – it will not work properly in other skins.

The thing that is quite special about this gadget is that it only uses CSS to achieve this – no Javascript was involved whatsoever (that's because I don't know any Javascript, but a lot of CSS). However, it does use a few elements from the unfinished CSS3 standard, which is not very well supported in browsers yet. The browsers I know it works in are Firefox 2.0+, Opera 9.51, Safari 3 & 4dp1, SeaMonkey 1.1.9+, Konqueror 3.5.9+, Kazehakase 0.5.2+ and Midori 0.0.17+. It does not work in Internet Explorer 7 (big surprise).

The gadget is extremely easy to adapt to other wikis. All you need to do to adapt it for your wiki is the change a few variables, depending on the number of submenus (called portlets in the source code) and their IDs, and you're good to go. The source code of the gadget includes instructions on how to adapt it.

The gadget is currently at v1.1.4. If you have any comments, suggestions or bugs to report for it, post them at this page's talk page.

Screenshots[edit]

Screenshots taken with Firefox 3.1 Alpha in Ubuntu.

List of wikis with the gadget installed[edit]

Please add your wiki here (even if it's not a Wikimedia wiki) if you install this gadget.