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Thanks, Martin!
A shout-out to Martin Aspeli, who made my life happier this week...
... by writing the Creating A Custom Navigation Section how-to on Plone.org. I have been struggling for a while to grok a sensible way to implement dynamic drop-down menus for a Plone site. (Limi is probably getting a headache as I type this, but hey, the customer is sometimes always right.) Martin's timely article provided the "missing link" for me between Plone's navigation and the various CSS/javascript drop-down menu techniques.
Thanks, Martin! You're are, for this among so many other reasons, a rock star.
And while we're on the subject, check out the Mid-Peninsula Regional Open Space District for a nice example of how drop-down navigation can actually open up the design of a site quite a bit.
Thoughts on Sprout and qDropDownMenu
Sprout and qDropDownMenu are IMHO both good efforts, but fall a little short for me for the following reasons:
Sprout 0.11 (current as of this writing) works great if there's only one Plone site in the Zope instance, or if you install it for ALL Plone sites in the instance, but if you install it in Zope, it breaks all the nav for all the sites in the instance until it's installed for every site in the instance. That's not so great for folks like us who are hosting a bunch of sites per instance, not all of whom want/need Sprout. That said, Sprout is hugely useful, and should probably find its way into Plone 2.5, if not a 2.1.x release. And I know that this "bug" has already been mentioned on the lists, so hopefully it will be fixed Real Soon.
qDropDownMenu is also a nice effort, but AFAIK, it seems to require that the user maintain an HTML formatted list to build the drop down menus, rather than reading the site's content structure. That makes for a "brittle" navigation structure that isn't fully dynamic, and also requires the users to know how to create and maintain an HTML list. Most of users don't -- that's why we implement Plone for them.
Plone Dropdown Menu and Sprout
Hey Jon - yeah, Martin kicks ass on the documentation! You may also want to check out Plone Dropdown Menu by the Quintagroup guys (http://quintagroup.com/services/plone-development/products/plone-drop-down-menu) and Sprout (http://plone.org/products/sprout) which was just released by the Enfold guys. It extends the Plone navigation tree so that you can change the behavior of the navigation portlet via a configlet.