Oct

30

Expandable menus

Filed Under (How To, Site maintenance) by Tricia on 30-10-2006

Have you noticed how the menus on my side bar roll up neatly? The automatically expand when you click the + sign beside the title of the menu.

If you’re wondering how I did that simply go to the Flooble website’s script section and select the Expandable Menu script. Just follow the directions, changing the text and background colors to suit your blog and within a few minutes you’ll have the code for the expandable script to put on your own website.

You need to make a new script for each menu that you create, but once you’ve made the first one with your customized colors it’s very easy.

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Comments:

9 Responses to “Expandable menus”

1. GW (7 comments.) on 10 Mar 2008 at 9:56 pm #
   
   

   I know this is quite an old post of yours, but I’m hoping you’ll see this. With the Flooble expandable content script, did you put the script in text widgets in your sidebar? Where should I put the initial script? That’s where I’m stumped since I’m not well versed in CSS and am confused by all the various templates. I know some call info from other files, while some display content from within themselves. I really like the Flooble script and would like to use it in my WordPress blog’s sidebar. I have multiple blogrolls and have them neatly embedded in Flooble scripts, one for each — just don’t know where to plug the stuff all in to make it work in my blog!
2. Tricia (34 comments.) on 10 Mar 2008 at 11:24 pm #
   
   

   Hello GW. Yes you can use the Flooble expandable content script in text widgets. I’m assuming we’re talking about a Wordpress blog? I use a few expandable content scripts in widgets on a few of my blogs so I can assure you that it does work.

   The initial script portion needs to go into your pages header right above the end of the header code
   /head . I left out the < and the > as around that code as I don’t think WP would let it come through in my comment.

   I don’t know if you’ve done much editing of your sites theme, but you’ll need to go into Presentation, Theme Editor and then select your header file in order to place the initial expandable script above the /head tag. Once you save that file, place your flooble expandable script code in a text widget and whatever you are using it for should work properly in your sidebar.

   Hope that helped!
3. GW (7 comments.) on 11 Mar 2008 at 9:13 am #
   
   

   Hi, Tricia - Thanks! I e-mailed you this, but thought I’d copy the question into comments since someone may have the same issue and benefit from further discussion about this.

   Hi, Tricia -

   Thanks for the quick reply! I put the script in my current theme’s header template right before the tag and put my Flooble scripts in a text widget. However, the page displayed an error in the widget’s place:

   Fatal error: Cannot use string offset as an array in /home/MyDirectory/public_html/wp-includes/widgets.php on line 533

   Any ideas about that? I removed the code from the widget, but left the initial Flooble code in the header file.

   Thanks,
   Kimberley
4. Tricia (34 comments.) on 11 Mar 2008 at 10:10 am #
   
   

   GW I answered you by email since I got that first, but like you I’ll include my reply here in case it helps someone else too:

   I think I know what’s wrong. I use a plugin that allows php to be executed in widgets and on wp pages it’s called Exec-PHP

   http://bluesome.net/post/2005/08/18/50/ I believe the most current version of this plugin works with Wordpress 2.2 to 2.3 so if your installation is fairly up to date it should work for you.

   Just download the plugin and activate it and the flooble script should work in your widget (as will any php code I believe - I first got this plugin so that I could make my translate buttons work). (just make sure that you also make a new flooble script for each of your blogrolls or whatever else you want an expandable menu for).

   Oh and the latest version gives a message that php won’t be executable in anything you write in visual mode unless you turn off the message in your user profile at the bottom of the user profile page.

   OK now I think you’ve got enough information to get those flooble scripts working for you!
5. GW (7 comments.) on 11 Mar 2008 at 11:27 pm #
   
   

   Well, I installed and activated the Exec-PHP plug-in, and have the Flooble script inserted just before the /HEAD tag in my theme’s header.php file, but I am still getting this error displaying on my page when I have a Flooble script in a text box widget:

   Fatal error: Cannot use string offset as an array in /home/domain/public_html/wp-includes/widgets.php on line 533

   I am e-mailing you a copy of header.php — if you can take a look at it and tell me if I’ve put Flooble in the right place, I’d appreciate it.

   Thanks for bearing with me on this!
6. GW (7 comments.) on 11 Mar 2008 at 11:55 pm #
   
   

   Something’s really screwy since I had the code in the widget and header file. When I went back to my Presentation > Widgets, my RSS widget was blank and my text box which previously held the Flooble script was empty, including the header line for it. What the heck?
7. GW (7 comments.) on 12 Mar 2008 at 1:23 am #
   
   

   I put my simple text widget saying to look for my blogroll on a linked page. After that text box I have my META widget. Now, I get *this* error.

   Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 10485760 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 78 bytes) in /home/domain/public_html/wp-includes/cache.php on line 48

   So I’m having cache issues? Aargh.
8. GW (7 comments.) on 12 Mar 2008 at 1:27 am #
   
   

   I cleared my browser cache, then did a shift refresh. This time, I saw this error:

   Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 10485760 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 40961 bytes) in /home/domain/public_html/wp-content/plugins/exec-php/includes/runtime.php on line 40

   Do you like a good mystery? Is this a good one? LOL If it is a bad mystery, let me know and I will quit bugging ya.
9. GW (7 comments.) on 12 Mar 2008 at 1:38 am #
   
   

   Me again, one more time before I crash. I deactivated one of my plug-ins, Smart YouTube, and refreshed my index. Now the text and RSS widgets display properly. So, is there a limit as to how much data can be called upon at a time or something?