Blogger.com Wishlist - More Flexibility and Options for the Navigation Menu

The "Pages" and the "Link List" gadgets allow you to create a menu bar when you place those gadgets. That's a big improvement since the introduction of the new template designer, because from then on, those menu bars have been integrated into the templates. Therefore once these gadgets are "added" to your blog, you can change the look and feel of the bar itself, the "buttons" and the font.

In the context of using Blogger.com for more than "pure" blogging and to make the menu bar much more usable and flexible, here are our wishes:

1. combine the Pages and Link List options, so that the menu bar links can point to pages as well as  configurable URLs
2. although technically, once that combination is possible, one could include the URL with the Label Search, for most users it would be great to include pre-configured choices, like
• home (including the option to insert an image as logo on the menu bar)
• pages
• labels
• posts
• enter link URL
• search element (the search field is often nicely 
3. last but not least, drop-down menus would be great, 
• freely configurable or
• if the top link is selected as label, the sub-menu could include up to 7 (?) laets or selected posts and the last sub-link for "more".

The drop-down element could be included as an additional "menu" element, same functionality as the normal menu bar element, just nested in to the main menu bar...

Participate in improving Blogger.com!

Google's Product Ideas Team asks for ôur wishes and requests to improve Blogger.com. They did that last year as well and, wow, a couple of months later the hibernation status of Blogger.com suddenly ended. Of course, Blogger.com always improved over time, but since early 2010 things started to change rapidly and the improvements have been huge.

So now it's "Round 2". And my biggest three wishes are

1. more flexibility and options to customise the menu bar (more in this follow up post)
2. conditional page elements, which allow to set "if" options when certain elements should be displayed. Those settings could be done on the dashboard "Page Elements" for elements and gadgets as well as within the gadgets. Such conditional page elements allow to create custom pages (including the homepage / homeUrl) as well as contextual gadgets. I described that in more detail in a previous post.
3. A possibility to offer 3rd party tools and services for Blogger.com like an appstore, incl checkout and licensing (default is free and open source, services can use Google checkout). That includes the ability to offer "admin" gadgets which can be selected in the same way as normal gadgets. Therefore no need to manipulate the HTML code anymore for powerusers. Those "admin" gadgets allow for example 
1. to include code in the Head section as well as 
2. extend the CSS default options for 3rd parties to add options (such as a URL for the background rather then uploading the image)
3. allow the user to save and keep templates, his own customised templates as well as 3rd party ones...

I have a lot more wishes, but those are details compared to my top 3.

Step 4 - Creating a Blogger navigation menu

In principle, this is an easy fix.  You create a bunch of pages you want to link to, you create "room" for that navigation bar, you linkt the "buttons" to the pages. But...
That's ok if you don't share the site with others. because if you need a CMS to collaborate on publishing and design, well you need to dig a bit deeper.
The best soltion I have found so far is the bloggertuts tutorial by Dante Araújo.  Not only do you create a menu based navigation, but you also allow your power-users to edit the link list without editing the main CSS / HTML of the template.  Dante has cleverly solved that by combining the code for the menu with the link-list Blogger-gadget.  You can check it out on here.

Until I found his solution, the menu navigation was more a quick-fix, a workaround which needed design administrators to hack the core code. Not bad, but not elegant enough to care for the power users that a good CMS need to cater for.

Besides the elegant collaboration function, Dante's process solves another frequent Blogger menu problem.  Web visitors are used to get feedback from menus when hovering and clicking on the links, or "buttons".  Using a CSS javascript code of a typical menu, in Blogger that functionality works fine.  What doesn't work is the current page highlight once a link has been selected.  Blogger is a publishing system and "method" which needs to be included in the code of the navigation bar.  Dante solves that by using the ".current" class variable.

Of course you can use visual tricks in order to produce a similar effect for the user without  using the ".current" setting, but this is neat and elegant.

Other tips can be found on Amanda's BloggerBuster site, a great resource and on woork.blogspot.com (which has now moved to woorkup.com) X has great examples of nice and tidy menu navigation which can can use.  I recommend using Dante's method to "migrate" and adapt them for your Blogger site.