Automated Menu Creation

This tutorial shows you how to use the Macros to automatically generate self-updating menus...

There are three scenarios where you might want to automate the structure of your menus:

• You have a big menu structure that matches the structure of content in your space
• You want to allow other people to add content and have the menus automatically updated
• You're lazy (a bit like me) and don't want to type loads of Wiki Markup Editor to create your menus

If any of those describe you, read on

But first, there are some scenarios where you might want to avoid automating menus:

• Automated menus can't have icons in them (yet... we're working on that feature)
• Automated menus have limited ordering options (alphabetically, date, etc) - if you want a very specific order to items, you'll have to manually add them.
• You can't define custom on-screen text or tool tips when using macros (unless they specifically support such a feature)

So, assuming that you still want to automate your menus, let's begin...

Macros to the Rescue

You can use any macro that outputs an unordered bullet list of items within a menu. Let's take a look at two of them...

{children} macro

This is by far the most common macro to make it's way in to the menu settings:

{menu}[Builder] 
  {children}
{menu}

The children macro basically creates a bulleted list of child pages from a given starting point. The example shown above would look something like this if you put it on a page:

And produces the following menu:

As you can see, there's no other items showing - that's because this page doesn't have any children. However, if we were on a page with children then the list would be generated.

To ensure that children are listed from a specific starting point, use the page parameter as follows:

{menu}[Builder] 
  {children:page=Builder}
{menu}

Which would give:

Which results in the menu:

Voila! That's exactly ¹ how the Builder menu and most other menus are created at the top of pages in this user guide.

Footnotes

Reference	Notes
1	Well, not quite. We use the depth=2 parameter of the [children macro] to automatically create sub-menus for any pages that themselves have children.

{incoming-links} macro

The incoming-links macro lists pages that link to the current page. As such, if you're on a page that nothing links to, it won't output anything ² . However, as something does link to this page, we will get some output:

{menu}[Automated Menu Creation]   
  {incoming-links:style=disc}{incoming-links}
{menu}

As you can see, this macro needs to be told to output as a bulleted list (by default it outputs with icons, but not the sort that are usable in the menu) and because the macro can have a body we've had to include the closing tag as well.

On screen, for this specific page, the macro would display:

Which produces the menu:

Footnotes

Reference	Notes
2	The [incoming-links macro] actually allows you to specify what to output if there are no incoming links: {incoming-links:style=disc}* No incoming links{incoming-links}

Our Navigate Menu

While writing this tutorial, we got a bit carried away playing around with other macros and came up with the idea of a navigate menu:

{menu}Navigate
  {submenu}Incoming Links
    {incoming-links:style=disc}* No incoming links{incoming-links}
  {submenu}
  {menuseparator}
  {submenu}Page Headings
    {wikimenu}{toc:maxLevel=5}{wikimenu}
  {submenu}
  {submenu}Child Pages 
    {children}
  {submenu}
{menu}

Be warned, if you add this menu, it can get very big! We've included it here as an example of the different types of macros that can be used.

Have fun!