Turning the breadcrumb into a navigation menu idea. Rubbish?

[Stuart Wright]

Not sure if this is a small or big feature.

So we have had an extended menu on AVForums for years where people can drill down a fair way into the sub forums to quickly get to the area of interest.


and I was thinking about how we could implement this into Xenforo when we move in August.
Going forward the new header will have more of an emphasis on editorial and the forums will be just one of several main menu options, making the job even harder.



Then I had a thought that maybe we could use the breadcrumb as a way to navigate through the nodes.
Hover over one of the breadcrumbs in the trail and the whole list of siblings drops down. From there it's possible to highlight one and its children pop out to the right in another list. And so on.

I created a mockup. Obviously it would need to be styled to look much prettier.


It would allow for relatively fast navigation to every node in the forum from every page, and would, of course, need to use the jQuery system detailed here.
Anyone think this is a good idea? Or is it rubbish?

 

[Alpha1]

Compromise between concise node names and best SEO value.

Exactly why tweaking over and over can take so much time.

 

[DRE]

I've seen this some time ago in the get satisfaction software https://getsatisfaction.com/getsatisfaction

I love the idea and i thought people would love & use it, so i created a xf addon, but my stats showed that the users never get familiar with this ( IN THE BREADCRUMB), so i removed it again.
People prefered to have this feature in navbar and the quick navigation (even if the quick navigation is a massive failure, depending on the community 0-24% of the registered users used it at least once )

Can you hook me up with this I would love to experiment with it.

 

[EQnoble]

So your solution could cope with our long forum names and deep subforums? That's interesting. That design element of this challenge seems the trickiest part to me. I bet the back end database interrogation and population of the menu structure would be something more people could figure out.

Yeah my menu script will display everything just fine provided that the titles already fits inside each of the menu and submenu containers and then that is just a matter of styling individual menu items so it could be easily adjusted.

For me it is the opposite, I find just jumping in there and writing js and php from scratch to be easier than finding out what extends what and what contains what vars and blahzeblah. I wish I knew some of the people in that 'more people' category who weren't too busy or whatever, then I wouldn't have a truckload of unfinished addons. lol

 

[Stuart Wright]

This might be inspiration for a solution for the responsive design: http://www.designchemical.com/lab/demo-wordpress-jquery-drill-down-ipod-menu-plugin/

 

[Stuart Wright]

Chatted with Shawn at Digital Point. He pointed out his menu, and you know, this looks like the easiest solution I've seen so far. All we have to do is figure out

• how to load the menu with permissions
• put the menu under the right breadcrumb element (maybe show a version under each element or just the Forums element?)
  
• how to deal with responsive design

 

[Kevin]

Chatted with Shawn at Digital Point. He pointed out his menu, and you know, this looks like the easiest solution I've seen so far. All we have to do is figure out...

I thought you had rejected that style of menu already.

The Digital Point menu is, of course complete and comprehensive, and appropriate for their technical audience. I think it would be a bit much for our audience who can be less technical and less able to cope with mega big menus.

Personally I like the idea you were going with for the breadcrumbs but realistically I think it'd be a feature that the actual users wouldn't use much, a bit like the stock XF Quick Navigation link. The DP solution would be more apparent to the users making it likely more used but from your earlier mockup would it satisfy the number of sub-forum levels that you're working with?

 

[Stuart Wright]

To conclude this thread, an addon has been created to do what we wanted here:
http://xenforo.com/community/resources/forum-jump-menu-by-waindigo.2391/