New menu structure

As you can see I was getting a bit tired of the old menu structure, the menu's were annoying on a mobile device and some became so long that my site re-sized to a height to accommodate the menu while the content ended like 400 pixels higher in some cases. The last thing was of course just me being a prick and wanting to have stuff perfect.

So, while still in place the top menu doesn't expand anymore (except the home button for the and about/contact pages which no-one ever uses), this has become the main navigation menu which only contains links to the different content sections. Each content section got it's own menu on the left side which I build with the Views add on module Views Accordion.

This module doesn't do everything the way I like but at least it comes close. I would like to be able to have two layers of collapsible items, this module only provides one. I might be able to work around that with a view in a view, but I will have to test this on a later date.

Also, I find one thing confusing, you can set the view to open the active row basid on the url AND you can set a default. Opening the active row works like a charm, if you navigate to a blog the correct year/month expands nicely. However, if you navigate to one of the Blog Overview pages which aren't in the menu, ergo, it cannot open an active row, than it doesn't open the default row. I have set the default row to be Row 1, in the preview this is January. In the live site it suddenly is October 2013 ??? I really have no clue why this is or why this works badly. I will dig in to this also at a later date, now it is time to go to sleep.

An alternative solution is using the JQuery Menu module for Drupal. I have tested this and it works nicely after some restyling. The only drawback I find is the menu sorting used by Drupal. This keeps forcing me to assign weights to each item and making sure they are displayed in the correct sequence and in general gives a few minutes of extra work with each item I add to this site. I have been looking for a module that allows menu sorting by publishing date or some other criteria, the only thing I found was taxonomy terms which is not really useful for a site like this one. I might switch to this module anyway later on because this will allow me to have the menu's collapse by year as well as by month which might actually be very nice in a few years from now. I just hope I can find some way to sort menu's easier so my content is always newest on top.

I do like the way Views Accordion switches from one item to an other though, it's a very nicely done animation, haven't tested this with the JQuery Menu yet.