Menu Icons

This tutorial explains how to add icons to your menus in Theme Builder 2.x...

If you've seen our company website, you will notice that most items menus have an icon.

The icons help to make items more recognisable, especially for regular visitors.

Icon Requirements

The icons must be 16x16 pixels and can be GIF, JPEG or PNG format. We recommend using GIF icons as they are the most widely supported format that supports transparency.

For avoidance of doubt, you can not use Windows icons (.ico files) or Macintosh icons.

The method for adding icons to menus is slightly different depending on whether you're adding them to the menu bar or one of the pop-up menus...

Icons on the Menu Bar

To add an icon to a button on the menu bar, use the following notation:

{menuitem}{menulink:home}{menuicon:house} Home{menulink}{menuitem}
{menuitem}[!http://adaptavist.com/glyphs/cubes.png! Builder|Builder|Stuff about Builder...]{menuitem}

If you pasted that in to a page, this is what it would look like:

• Home
• [!http://adaptavist.com/glyphs/cubes.png! Builder]

As you can see, the icon has been included inside the link. This is critical if you want the icon to be displayed properly on the menu bar.

To display these icons and links in a menu bar, use the following notation (see Creating Menus 2.x for more information):

{menubar}
 {menuitem}{menulink:home}{menuicon:house} Home{menulink}{menuitem}
 {menuitem}[!http://adaptavist.com/glyphs/cubes.png! Builder|Builder|Stuff about Builder...]{menuitem}
{menubar}

Which results in:

As you can see from the notation above, you can either use wiki notation to add the images (see Images, Flash, Videos and Audio for more information) or the handy menuicon macro which provides numerous ready-made icons.

Icons in Pop-up Menus and Sub-Menus

The notation to get icons in pop-up menus and sub-menus is almost identical, however the image must be outside the link. You can compare the differences between icons on the menu bar (the {menu} lines) and those on pop-up menus / sub-menus (the {menuitem} lines):

{menubar}
 {menu}{menulink:home}{menuicon:house} Home{menulink}
  {menuitem}{menuicon:house} {menulink:home}Home{menulink}{menuitem}
 {menu}
 {menu}[!http://adaptavist.com/glyphs/cubes.png! Builder|Builder|Stuff about Builder...]
  {menuitem}!http://adaptavist.com/glyphs/cubes.png! [Builder|Builder|Stuff about Builder...]{menuitem}
 {menu}
{menubar}

And this is what it will look like in the menu bar: