Building a splitmenu with Yireo Template Helper

Building a splitmenu with Yireo Template Helper

Building a splitmenu with Joomla! modules is good for many cases, but it has a few downsides: For instance, if the submenu is empty, the menu-module will still display. Also, the title of the submenu-module is static, while you might want to display the title of the parent menu-item instead. With our Yireo Template Helper these things are made simple.

Using the Yireo Template Helper Yth

Yireo has created a simple PHP-class Yth (short for: Yireo Template Helper) to quickly add advanced PHP-logic to Joomla! templates. A splitmenu is part of this functionality. The Yth-class is GPL-ed, meaning you can take a peak at the source code and do the same thing in your PHP-code. Or you could use the following guidelines to ad Yth to your own template.

Downloading and including the Yth-class

The Yireo Template Helper is available for free on the product-page. Once downloaded, put the file yth.php inside your own template-directory. Within your index.php file you can include this new PHP-script with the following code:

include_once 'yth.php';

Once included you can use all the functions contained within the Yth-class.

Getting the splitmenu content

To get the menu-structure you need two calls to the Yth-class. The systemname of the menu is important here, as example we are using "mainmenu":

$topmenu = Yth::getSplitMenu( 'mainmenu', 0, 1 );
$submenu = Yth::getSplitMenu( 'mainmenu', 1, 9 );

Now we also want to fetch the title of the parent of the current submenu:

$submenu_title = Yth::getActiveParent();

Filling in the HTML

Now that the variables contain all the menu-content, we can use these variables to print the menus. Instead of using JDoc-tags in our HTML-code, we just add the following PHP-code:

<div id="topmenu"><?php echo $topmenu; ?></div>

And for the submenu:

<div id="left">
<div class="moduletable">
<h3><?php echo $submenu_title; ?></h3>
<?php echo $submenu; ?>
</div>
</div>

Checking if the menu is empty

Now that we have everything in place, there's one more issue to solve: If the submenu is empty, we actually do not want to display either the containing div or the submenu-title. We use an extra if-statement for this:

<div id="left">
<?php if(!empty($submenu)) { ?>
<div class="moduletable">
<h3><?php echo $submenu_title; ?></h3>
<?php echo $submenu; ?>
</div>
<?php } ?>
</div>

That's it.