Thanks, glad you like it. 3000 is a heap: the main bottleneck I found is
IE's slow javascript capabilities. I spent a lot of time tuning it to
work with IE, but the other browsers just totally smoke it. I haven't
tried 3000 nodes, though. Let me know how it goes. Even if the speed is
OK, though, that's like ~100+ items per submenu, which would make for a
pretty 'tall' menu, I suspect (part of which might go off the bottom of
the view port, depending on number of cols, font sizes and height of
each list item).
You might want to check out the listnav plugin, which keeps the list on
the page, rather than putting it into a menu, too. I'll be announcing a
new rev of that shortly, but it's up:
http://www.ihwy.com/labs/jquery-listnav-plugin.aspx
Thanks,
Jack
brian wrote:
Very nice. I just recently put together letter-based navigation for an
app, though each "letter request" uses ajax to fetch the appropriate
results. The complete set, though, is something over 3000 items and
growing. All the same, I think I'll write a quick script to dump
everything to listmenu and see what the performance is like.
Nice work!
On Mon, Mar 2, 2009 at 4:05 PM, Jack Killpatrick <j...@ihwy.com> wrote:
Hi All,
Today we released the iHwy listmenu plugin, which allows you to convert a
basic 'list' of HTML elements (UL, OL or any set of child elements) into a
snazzy dropdown menu with letter-based navigation (ie: A | B | C | etc).
The plugin is very easy to use. In most cases all you will have to do is
create the list of elements and then use one line of jQuery code to convert
the list into the navigation menu. When a user hovers over a navigation
letter in the menu a submenu appears containing all of the items from the
list that start with that letter.
The items in the submenu are arranged in nicely balanced columns. If the
list was an ordered (OL) list, numbering starts at 1 for each letter and is
maintained across the columns (top to bottom, left to right) for that
letter. There are options to control the number of columns and the 'gutter'
space between them, among other things.
The HTML generated by the plugin is designed with CSS styling in mind and a
starter css file is included to help implement the plugin.
We tuned this plugin for speed and tested it in FF 3.x (Win/Mac), IE
6/7/8rc, Opera (latest), Safari (Mac 3.2.1, Win 4beta) and Google Chrome
(Win) using jQuery 1.3.2 and 1.2.6 (1.3.2 is faster, probably because of
sizzle).
This is great plugin for big product lists, address books, contact lists,
etc. It makes a hard to navigate plain old list into something really
compact and very easy to visually skim that's only visible when you need it.
Full info:
http://www.ihwy.com/Labs/jquery-listmenu-plugin.aspx
Demos:
http://www.ihwy.com/Labs/demos/current/jquery-listmenu-plugin.aspx
This project grew out of the jquery listnav plugin that we released in late
2008. We'll be releasing a new rev of that today, too.
Let me know if you have any questions. Enjoy the plugin!
Thanks,
Jack
twitter: http://www.twitter.com/ihwy_jack
