Following my initial comments on MbD’s post “Also for TA: Drop down menu in navigation bar” (comment here) and as an example of an overflow box menu, I’ve created a test menu using our member feeds, sitting right below the “regular” member feeds menu I created yesterday.
This is to show how we could use such a box as a menu (e.g., for members’ “About Me” pages or Halloween Bingo / Festive Tasks master update posts), if we wanted to provide links to those member posts / pages directly from the sidebar (instead of sending site visitors to a separate index page), regardless how many member page links we need to accommodate — AND to the extent we can’t use a drop-down menu: please note MbD’s comments in her original post (bottom line: drop-down menus too far down the sidebar may run into spacing and visibility issues).
I’ve left the pre-formatted “underlined” design of the links forming the menu in place to show that this really is just a simple list of links, stuck inside a box that is smaller than (= not as high as) the height of the actual list (which in turn is what forces the “overflow” mechanism to activate). Like all other sidebar features, this can be changed. (Err, at least in theory. If we can get WP to cooperate.)
The size (height / width) of the box is customizable at will. On my own blog I typically use heights of 300px or 350px — those would have been too large to show the “overflow” functionality with a list as short as our current number of member feeds, but they might still be the right size(s) for a “Members’ About Me Pages” menu, if we wanted to use an overflow box to link to those. And as it is only the height of the box itself that we need to worry about in terms of the space this item takes in the sidebar, there is no limit to the number of lines (links to member pages / master posts) that such a menu can accommodate.
ETA (for MbD):
This is what the overflow menu looks like on my screen.
Maybe it’s dependent on what browsers we use and how they are configured?
I like the look of that a bit more than a hover dropdown – simply because it conforms to the style of the rest of the sidebar. My only concern is that the scroll bar disappears against the current background (which is awesome and I wouldn’t want to see changed just because of a scroll bar).
Really — you think it disappears? And there was me thinking it’s too jarringly obvious! 😀
Agreed on the background image; I definitely want to keep it as well.
The scroll bar does on my page; it’s black and blends really well with the dark colors on the background. Why, what color is your scroll bar? Or maybe it’s a screen size issue?
On my screen it’s grey, the bar itself very light grey — so it really stands out — and the scroller almost the same shade as the background behind our posts (i.e., the background of the main body of the site). I’ll add a screenshot to this post to show you.
Oh yeah, that looks totally different to what I’ve got on my screen. I’ll try to get a screenshot of mine …
2 things: here’s the screenshot, and what do you think about images in comments?
I just discovered that if I activate the scroll bar, and THEN hover my mouse over it, it goes bright gray like yours, though without the horizontal bar (likely because I have my window stretched out).
I’m almost certain it’s a matter of browser configuration. I always have both the vertical and the horizontal bar — even if (like on my own blog) the box itself is actually much wider than the widest part of its contents.
I see! I’ve made the box narrower; that should at least have moved your scrollbar outside of the window frame with its black vertical lines. (I hope it now doesn’t land right on one of the vertical branches of the tree on your screen — on my screen it doesn’t. Though probably if it’s too far down it’s now going to blend in seamlessly with the fur color of the cat … (sigh).
Narrower works, but you’re right, if it’s too far down, it blends perfectly with the black cat. 😀 But it’s fine, I know the scroll is there, so the bar isn’t really necessary – and as a Mac/Safari user, what I see is probably in the minority anyway.