Menus and such

You would have to ask Andrew Boon this question.  There were many people asking similar questions about Boonex either buying code or hiring developers to help with Dolphin.  Boonex as a company started to falter.  It is my belief that they dusted off the old Dolphin 8 code; the Studio in UNA was coded some eleven to twelve years ago, in an attempt to say they had a new product to try and revive the company.  It is funny to see Boonex talking about the apps; core and power, then see in the code "modules."  UNA code is full of BxDol; they didn't even bother to clean up the references and prefixes in UNA.

 Why didn't Boonex just hire you to improve their product then everyone would be happy.

 Yes; I had a lot of discussions with this with Boonex developers that went nowhere; just like most discussions with Boonex go nowhere even over at UNA.io.

Hi Deano. That looks good. I tested it on Chrome's emulator and my Samsung Mobile and it's intuitive. Forum looks great with each sub menu item listed under the other, but market looks looks a bit chaotic. Are you trying for multiple columns there? I realise the list would become quite extended, but maybe the items could be centered?

It's a vast improvement, but I dread the thought of having to reformat my evo template to take advantage of this. I will however, because the menu is far superior even at this stage. Well done.  John

 
Thats the plan. The admin backend will eventually have it's own template separate from the main site.

The admin section for the most part uses the base. The modules section in admin is the only area that breaks when the uni template is removed.

Even base will eventually be removed. Each template in Cheetah will eventually be independent. No importing of CSS which is a discouraged practice anyway.

I was under the impression that the UNI template was used by the backend side of things in Dolphin.  I think that the backend css should be disconnected from any site template.

@JohnK. I have been playing with the menus on this site. It should be close to what you are looking for. I still need to do something different when displayed on phones.

I am also developing a new Default template for Cheetah called Evolution that will use this sites menu design. I will keep Evo in the cheetah distro for a while, but within one to 2 versions, ALT and UNI will be removed.

I can't believe some people call for what the big boys are doing.

You can NOT compete. Think about 'specialities' that they don't do; or drop.

Targeted RSS, groups, personalisation; paid membership.

Yes, paid membership is the way forward.

Basically, think about your niche.

If they want to be where you are, they will 'have to pay' to be there.

One thing I have come across is the use of CloudFlare; people using it forget they are using it and then run into problems where updates or files changes don't appear.  If using CloudFlare, you have to clear the CloudFlare cache or it will serve outdated files stored in the CloudFlare cache.  This is probably true for other CDN solutions.

It's funny you should say this. In recent weeks I've been plagued with changes not appearing. In the old days (6 months ago) I could clear my browser cache and most changes would appear. Today I'm constantly clearing the site cache, browser cache, sometimes the server cache, logging out, going for a shower, clearing cookies, replacing backup files and the thing still won't work. Then "Boom", without touching anything, all will come back to normal. I'm using Chrome and I reckon it has something to do with a recent browser update.

A recent example was a small change I made stopped Dolphin/Cheetah photos and thumbs from appearing. I could still see thumbs associated with 3rd party modules. I spent hours back tracking and found nothing.  When I used the browser back button which I'd used a dozen times before, all was normal again.

I am trying to come up with a solution that is similar to what your looking for that's friendlier on mobile phones.

During all my messing around i have created a problem here in the forums again with the the reply not scrolling back up to the top. If it isn't one thing, it's another.

I of course keep backups of all files i change, but despite restoring those backups, that stupid scroll bug is still there.

Anyhoo. I will find a solution to both issues eventually.

It ain't a perfect world , is it?  When I did the test on another working site there were far fewer sub menu items and they looked fine. I've revisited the test site and I agree that it doesn't look good at all.

I've essentially resolved one problem (I think) by setting the MORE button not to appear. I set it to a figure greater than my existing menu items and this means a user can scroll from one end of the list to another without the MORE button stopping them. I much prefer the way it's done on this site, but I'll just have to wait.

Are you satisfied with the way that it looks on a phone? Although it is responsive, i don't think it's going to work well for phones if there are a lot of items. Example from the photos section of your test site.

This thread about a breadcrumb style sub-menu appeared on the Boonex Forum in 2017-18 I tried it then but couldn't get it to work. I revisited a day or so ago and got it to work by modifying the path in the head injection.  I had to use the full path to get it to work

Boonex Forum Post

It's exactly what I need and when combined with the menu used in this site I believe all my menu problems will be solved.

You can see it in action here   

Although it works correctly on Dolphin, for reasons I can't explain it lists the items in reverse order on the Cheetah site:

Help-About Us instead of About Us - Help.

 Google have just made their Video conferencing tool  free, obviously to compete with Zoom. This is my ten cents worth for what it's worth:

Running a commercially orientated video chat from your own server  could be very costly. No problems with one-on-one and maybe small groups with Cheetah, but if you want anything more , it would be best to use one of the above offerings.

Although the Swiss Army Knife is a  handy and universal tool, none of its features are as good as tools dedicated to a single task. Te Core of Cheetah should be the pouch, the components making up the knife should be modules, because not everyone needs a cork screw  or pig stabber these days.

Hello ladies and gents, just want to throw something out there, due to covid-19 many humans plan to work from home, so video chat will be bigger then ever. Just wanted to lay this on the table.

I am aware of it. Which is why i said the menu still has problems. It does not happen on my phone which is a Samsung Galaxy J7. But does happen on my iPhone 5. It does it on phones with smaller screen sizes. Phones small enough where it can only display two menu items before the more.

I had a quick look at the way FB does it because this is where almost all my members tend to spend their time. The approach is a bit different and I "think" I can see why they're confused with my site. It seems that  FB lists things like a Table of Contents in a book. I plan to do more research on it because at first glance  I did find it easier to use.

Deano, are you aware that this site's menu disappears on a mobile phone when used vertically? 

The home page shows the menu with thee listings: Home, Downloads More, and a vertical menu appears when you click More. That's perfect.  However, when you click "Members" or any other link  the menu disappears completely on the Member's page. 

This doesn't happen if the phone is in Landscape. All is fine. It also doesn't happen in Chrome's mobile phone test screen and that's why I never picked it up before

I'm using a Samsung S3

On mobile devices; especially phones, users are use to the three lines symbol (≡) to indicate a menu.  The V should be replaced with the three lines hamburger menu as that has become very common in usage.  If users see the hamburger menu, they will know that clicking on it will drop down a menu.  Also, no hover on phones; unless that has changed since I rarely use a phone for internet use.

The current Evo menu is useless on a mobile device. I've tried to tell people how it works, but they say they still haven't got a clue.  As such, I loose more members than I get because they all claim that navigation is hopeless. Oddly, they all seem contented on FB which is worse than Dolphin for finding your way around.

I do agree that your menu does fall over when it comes to sub-menus. Once again the user is forced to use the  V  arrow to find the sub menu and this is the second major complaint I  get. It would be fine if the sub-menu options were displayed as per my PHOTOS suggestion, or  the standard Alt style breadcrumb. Other than that, I've tested the menu on Chrome's mobile device simulator and it seems to work fine.

I know it's impossible to do everything at once , or even give an indication of when things will happen, thus work-around's are often the way to resolve problems and take the pressure off. 

How difficult would it be for you to supply a code snippet that removes the "V" sub menu in Evo and replace it with the Alt Breadcrumb or similar? 

I'd do it myself using Modzzz Global Links but some pages where the breadcrumb needs to be shown aren't represented in Page Builder. That puts it out of my league.

I plan on a updated version of the evo template which would also have this menu design. There are however a few flaws in this menu design that i am still debugging. So the menu is not finished yet.

I've just posted a suggestion for a responsive menu but I've just discovered that the menu being used on this site is precisely what I want. Just by accident I looked at the site using the Chrome Mobile display feature and I love the way the "More " button responds and the sub-menus are presented in a readable dropdown.

I read your comments when another member asked about the template, but I'm not so much interested in the template itself, but being able to integrate the menu with my current site would solve almost all my problems.

Is it possible to somehow do this at this early stage of Cheetah's development? In all honesty, the menu solves dozens of issues raised by other members over the years and it would be a strong reason for some people to move across.  

I'm about to redo my suggestion because this menu is far better than the one I suggested.

Regards

John