[Pro] Constructing a complex CSS menu

Being new to Freeway I’m not yet sure what it’s capable of or whether there are Actions for what I want to achieve – the online access to historical records of 30 different events that go back almost 200 years.

The first menu choice is to select the event, then the next choice is to select a time frame between date A and date B.

I envisage three CSS Menus, one for each choice, but don’t know how to link the three answers to go to a page listing all occurrences of the selected event which happened between the two selected dates.

From that list there will be a conventional hyperlink to a page giving detailed information about the event on that date.

I want to use a CSS Menu rather than the Calendar as this is more user friendly.

Freeway support suggest this needs PHP or MySQL coding, but I’m not technical, don’t do programming and don’t want the expense of buying third party expertise.

Any ideas anyone?


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The first menu choice is to select the event, then the next choice is to select a time frame between date A and date B.

And the third - the event itself? A bit more info (or a graphical illustration) required I think.

Without understanding fully your needs - or how many items are to be in this menu - I am not sure of the best approach.

One possibility could be something like a Tree menu http://www.deltadesign.co/fw_examples/menus/tree.html

David


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You might need to give some examples of the number of resources you expect to filter through, and what size they are. Dave’s example is based on a script I wrote, so I know that the way that it works is EVERYTHING is already in the page when the page loads, and the script just shows a filtered subset of the total data depending on your click. While this will work, for almost any amount of data imaginable, it will be dramatically slow to load as you get up into the hundreds and thousands of possible branching combinations.

The solution when you have lots of variable data is to load only the first menu’s worth of content, then issue a JavaScript request for the next menu based on the choice made in the first menu, and so on. That way, only the actually needed data is downloaded and shown at any one time. It’s a bunch more work up front, but for some combinations or types of data, it is literally the only way to make a practical site that people can use.

Walter

On Dec 21, 2012, at 4:24 AM, DeltaDave wrote:

The first menu choice is to select the event, then the next choice is to select a time frame between date A and date B.

And the third - the event itself? A bit more info (or a graphical illustration) required I think.

Without understanding fully your needs - or how many items are to be in this menu - I am not sure of the best approach.

One possibility could be something like a Tree menu http://www.deltadesign.co/fw_examples/menus/tree.html

David


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