The Indianapolis PHP Meetup Group Monthly Meetup

Okay, last month I lied...May is menu month! I apologize for missing the April meetup. A special thanks to John for hosting the meetup for us. Rest assured we'll go over all of the menu stuff in May.

The May PHP meetup will include a thorough discussion of menus and menu systems. We will discuss best practices for programming menus in XHTML using tables, unordered lists, definition lists and a combination of the three.

We'll also discuss the use of JavaScript in menu systems along with all of it's merits and faults. We'll talk about menu systems that require JavaScript, as well as menus that employ some nifty JavaScript trickery, but don't require your visitors to have JavaScript enabled.

I'll be showing off my own object-oriented PHP menu gererator. It includes methods for creating menus with and without dropdowns, as well as a method that determines which menu item is "current" or highlighted. It consists of two classes, "menu" and "menu_item". The "menu" class is used to organize and render the "menu_items", which can consist of one or more links. Those links are also assigned class attributes where appropriate, such as the last item of a menu. By using control structures such as the for loop, an entire menu system consisting of hundreds of lines of XHTML can be created in a matter of minutes.