“Smart Menus” option

[Remus]

Hello ! I found this new option in Menu Section of Weaver Xtreme

Use SmartMenus rather than default Weaver Xtreme Menus. SmartMenus provide enhanced menu support, including auto-visibility, transition effects, and MegaMenus. (★Plus)

I enabled it, which disclose the menu links and also hamburger menu, but it makes no sense. The hamburger menu is not clickable, it’s just displayed with no reason.
At least that’s what I see on page resize. Is there other behaviour on mobile ? I don’t have mobile browser available.

Thanks !

[scrambler]

can you post a link

[Remus]

I generated only one modified page for this thread.

[scrambler]

Did you by any change use the Mobile menu trigger option to change when the mobile menu comes on?

Because it looks like there is a bug with that option in the latest version

[Remus]

Just checked and option field is empty !
EDIT: I remember @weaver wrote there will be new features (smart menu included) in the new version of the Plus, but not yet released. maybe this is what’s missing.

Mobile Menu Trigger:

[scrambler]

@weaver

The primary (smart) menu, mobile menu is not working on his page ( http://tinyurl.com/q7y4dcn ). When you shrink the browser to mobile size, the mobile menu is always opened.

Do people need a new version of plus for smart menu to work?

[Weaver]

This is simply a timing issue with the release of Weaver Xtreme Plus.

Smart Menus require the next release of Weaver Xtreme Plus, which hasn’t been released yet. I hope withing a day or two.

Note that the options will be on the X-Plus menu.

Please note that the release of the new X-Plus has been delayed by the attempt to properly support mobile/desktop menu switch point. It turns out that it is technically impossible to implement this, and in fact the (non-working) option has been removed, and will not return.

[Remus]

@weaver
I received the test version on email: Plus (1.0.100), thank you !
I enabled Smart Menus and noticed a new .js file for this feature. So java and css concatenation it’s not working anymore, I must do a lot of testing for other minification settings, but so far it seems to be impossible 🙁
Other than that, I see that arrows are loading instantly even on a page with many videos and CF Rocket Loader enabled. This is quite an improvement 🙂

I’ve seen you already specified in options: Add space between desktop menu bar items (Use value > 1.0)
Maybe is too much space between menu items ? I noticed that values lower than 1.0 hide the arrows on some browsers.

[Weaver]

The SmartMenus script needs to be loaded at the top, so if the script concatenation plugin is perhaps moving things to the end, there would be issues.

There are probably no issues with css.

The whole method of combining JavaScript is very fragile – and clearly subject to problems. Seems to always have been that way. One performance solution to this is to use CloudFlare which will cache static content like JavaScript and significantly improve performance.

Note that the instruction for the space between menus does specify use a value > 1.0em. It does indeed fail with smaller values, as you noted.

[Remus]

I am disappointed I had to quit this feature, considering increased load time. It adds two more files in “above de fold” content. One for smart menu itself, the second is the dependency of jquery-core.
Is there any hope to improve it by loading it in footer ? You already made wonders with other issues of the theme, you’re an allmighty magician 🙂

[Weaver]

jQuery is always included with Weaver Xtreme in the head. The SmartMenus must also be loaded there. I’ve been really unable to see any real detectable performance hit due to the sript. It add only one new, fairly small script. If I had strong evidence that it actually was more than a few milliseconds for most hosts, it would be possible to provide a different theme head script, but I’m not really convinced it is necessary. And I do take perfromance seriously.

[Remus]

Of course jquery it’s always loaded in header. But before this I could move it to footer as Google Page Speed recommends. Not anymore, or the arrows are not loading. Now I remember text/rocketscript  was missing from page source yesterday. Meaning CF disabled RocketLoader (don’t know why) and increased loading time is also caused by this.
I will compare in Google Webmasters for an entire week. Thanks for detailed answers !

[Weaver]

While not absolutely essential, I believe best design practices would try to  get the menus to load as fast as possible. Because both Weaver Menu system – the free “native”version, and the X-Plus SmartMenus version, both use jQuery for menu effects, it is pretty important to have both jQuery and the relevant menu scripts load at the top. In the case of Weaver’s required JavaScript, it has been combined into two scripts, one that should be at the top, and the other that is okay to load at the end. SmartMenus should be loaded at the top for optimal menu performance, which is more critical than a few milliseconds needed to load the script itself.

[Remus]

Something must be wrong with the mobile SmartMenu:

After last Plus update to 1.1, I can’t change color for background of mobile arrows, but for submenus, color changes shows up instantly. 

This is the option:

Mobile Open Submenu Arrow BG: 

[scrambler]

Smart menu do not have a background for the arrows (as indicated by the phrase N/A: SmartMenus) 🙂 )

[Weaver]

I will try to make that more obvious in the next release.

Note that the basic menus and SmartMenus work somewhat differently for the Mobile menu.

The basic mobile menu actually has TWO links on each item with a submenu. The left part is a link to the actual page indicated by the link name. The arrow box (with a different BG, usually) is a second link that opens the submenu.

The SmartMenus uses the arrow indicator strictly as an indicator that there is a submenu. First click on a menu item will open the submenu. Second click opens the actual page linked by the menu item. This double-click functionality is probably more commonly used for mobile/touch menus by other websites, but the two-link approach used by the basic seems to be a bit easier to use. But the fact is that people used to using touch browsers (mobile and touchscreens) will get the submenu or main link page open without even thinking about it. Both of these solutions are much better than either an option box selector, or long vertical menus (as used by Weaver II).

[Author]

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