Joomla! 1.5 has many cool new features that have made our lives easier. In the Joomla! 1.0.x line, if you wanted to have Split Menus, you had to "trick" the system into doing what you wanted by micromanaging Menus and their Menu Items. Some big name template makers had fancy scripts that would mimic this technology in the past.

Let's see it in action!

This first image is an image of the Main Menu once "Features" is selected. You can see that the Sub-Navigation drops out underneath its parent. This is the typical way menus work. Let's now take a look at what the Split Navigation looks like.

As you can see from this image, once the "Features" menu item was clicked, it's Sub-Navigation did not drop down like normal. It shows up on the right side. This is because I told it to show up on the right side. You could have it show anywhere you wish as it is its own module, independent of Main Menu. The only part that ties the two together is that they are pulling data from the same menu.

Let's see how to do this yourself!

• You will want to start by making sure that you have a menu that has Sub-Navigation items. You can create dummy Sub-Navigation items if you need to.
• From the Administrator, click on "Extensions" -> "Module Manager".
• Click on the module for the menu that you want to enact split menus on.
• In the Parameters area on the right, change "End Level" to "1". "Start Level" should remain as "0". This is going to tell the Menu to only show one level in its menu. Are you catching on yet?

• The next thing that we need to do is to create another menu module for the menu that we just edited. In my case, it was Main Menu. I called my new menu "Sub Menu".
• In the Parameters area on the right, change "Start Level" to "1" and "End Level" to the max depth that you think your menu will ever be. I chose 5, but you can choose a higher number if you wish.

• For my example, I changed the module "Position" to "right" and I set "Show Title" to "No". Note: If you have you’re your title set to show and there are not Sub-Navigation items, then it will show an empty module, which looks tacky, at least on the default Joomla! 1.5 template.

Hopefully, this sheds a little light on the subject of Split Menus and gives you new insight of another of the many new feature available in Joomla! 1.5.

Kenneth Crowder has been involved in the Joomla! Community since the days of Mambo. He has volunteered many hours to help out the Open Source Project. He is considered an expert in all things related to Joomla!. He was a Technical Reviewer for Joomla! A Users Guide, as well as another book currently in the editing phase. Learn more about Ken.

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