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  • Created by Unknown User (gfraser), last modified on Feb 13, 2006

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Automated Menu Creation

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

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

  • You have a big menu structure that matches the structure of contnet in your [space]
  • You want to allow other people to add content and have the menus automatically udpated
  • 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 tooltips 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 un-ordered 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:

* [Builder] {children}

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:

  • [Builder]

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:

* [Builder] {children:page=Builder}

Which would give:

  • [Builder]
    不能呈现 {children}。 页面未找到: Builder。

Voila! That's exactly

Unknown macro: {footnote}

Well, not quite. We use the depth=2 parameter of the [children macro] to automaticall create sub-menus for any pages that themeselves have children.

how the Builder menu and most other menus are created at the top of pages in this user guide.

Unknown macro: {display-footnotes}

{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

Unknown macro: {footnote}

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}

. However, as something does link to this page, we will get some output:

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

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:

Our Navigate Menu

While writing this tutorial, I got a bit carried away playing around with other macros and thus the Navigate menu (at the top of all pages in this user guide) was born.

Here's how it was made:

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

Have fun!

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