TinyPortal Feature of the Month, December 2015

[Ken.]

TinyPortal has a number of great features and we would like to introduce you to them through these 'Feature of the Month' Topics. Keep checking back to see whats up next and if you would like to see a feature included just let me know and we'll try to work up some coverage for you.

For December it's the TinyPortal Menu Manager.
You can also find some great topics and articles in our TinyPortal Docs Boards.

The TinyPortal Menu Manager

When you first open the TinyPortal Menu Manager you'll find a very simple control page where you can '[Add Menu]', or edit existing menu's. Don't let that simplicity fool you!
The TP Menu Manager is a very powerful and versatile way to organize and display information on your site, so lets give it a little trial run to see if it would be useful on your site.

First, you'll want to go to: TinyPortal > Menu Manager > [Add Menu]... there you'll see that simple control page:



Next, click on the [Add Menu] link, type in a name for your menu and Save:


Now, in the Menu Manager control page you'll see your newly created menu:
... lets leave it there for now and switch over to the TP Blocks cp.


Now that you have created your menu we'll need a TP Block for it to be displayed in, so go to: TinyPortal > Panels and Blocks > Blocks and select the Panel where you want your Menu Block to appear:


In the panel you've chosen, click the '[Add Block]' link and give your block a name and the select the 'Menu' button and save.


Next, we can chose the display options for your Menu Block:
For mine, I'm using the 'TinyPortal 1.1' menu that we just created. For the 'Menu style: you'll have three options to pick from, for this one I'm going to leave it in the default; 'TPdivider2.gif'



Now that we've created our Menu and our Menu Block it's time to go back to the Menu Manager. As you can see in this next screen clip, in the TP Docs we have several menu's in use, there are a total of 16 that are currently in use, plus a few more that are inactive.
So, as we look at this screen clip and we see all of these 'Menu Items', we can then look at the following screen clip and see the resulting Menu Blocks in the left panel of the TP Docs home page.
NOTE: On the 'Pos' and 'Position' controls; on the left side of your Menu Manager control page you have the 'Pos' control that can be used to set the sequential order of each item by entering a number for each one. The 'Position' control can be used to set the indentation of an item in the list. For example if you look at the last four items in this image and then look at the next screen clip of the TP Docs home page you can see how the 'Position' control has set the indentation of those four items.


In the left panel 'Navigation' block we see the results of our efforts!


... if you have any questions or comments please post them in the TinyPortal Support Forums.

[Ken.]

Bringing this one back to the top.