Extension:TreeAndMenu

I've needed to create parser-functions a number of times which allow the rendering of dynamic menus. Each time I've created a specific extension for the job and have used code from TreeView to achieve it, so finally I bit the bullet and merged the best JavaScript dynamic menu I've found (Sons of Suckerfish) into the TreeView code base, and renamed the extension from TreeView5 to TreeAndMenu.

The TreeAndMenu extension allows bullet lists to be rendered as folder trees or dynamic drop-down menus. It has been tested successfully on MediaWiki versions 1.6.10, 1.8.4, 1.9.3, 1.10.2, 1.11.0, 1.12.0 and 1.13alpha. And is known to work on Safari, IE6, IE7 and all Mozilla based browsers such as Firefox and SeaMonkey.

Screenshot showing a tree on the left and a dynamic drop-down menu on the right

Installation
Create a TreeAndMenu folder in your extensions directory. Download the latest snapshot and extract it to your extensions directory. Then include it in your LocalSettings.php file as in the following example. The TreeAndMenu on SVN also contains the dTree tree menu component, but you may want to check source from www.destroydrop.com/javascripts/tree in case a later version is available.

Ensure that all the files you've downloaded and saved are accessible by the webserver.

Finally, add the CSS stylesheet to your installation by modifying/creating your MediaWiki:Common.css article (note that's an article not a file). Otherwise, your menu will look just like a nested list.

Usage
Tree-views are created by surrounding a normal nested bullet list within the following couple of examples:

The second tree example uses a tree-view parameter called openlevels to make the tree expand by default to one level. Currently the parameter can only be supplied on a per-tree basis, to have different branches open to different depths requires multiple tree definitions. The second argument is used to add a label to the tree (as shown on the tree at http://www.organicdesign.co.nz).

Parser function parameters

 * root= The content of the root node. Later this will also affect how sub-trees work
 * id= A tree must be given a unique identifier if you want its state to be persistent
 * openlevels= Opens a tree to specified depth by default
 * open= equals top | bottom
 * close= equals top | bottom

Images
Docs to come...

CSS styles for trees
The style of trees is defined using CSS by adding the rules to your MediaWiki:Common.css article. An example set of CSS rules have been included below which are those supplied with the dTree source code.

CSS styles for menus
The look and layout dynamic menus can also be configured purely in CSS by adding the rules to your MediaWiki:Common.css article. Below is an example which was used in the example at OrganicDesign:Extension talk:TreeAndMenu.php.

Dynamic Trees and Menus
You can use transclusion to embed the content of trees from other articles, or dynamically manipulate the content. For example a DPL query could generate the body of a treeview statement. Articles containing trees should not have any whitespace above the wikitex markup specifying the parser function tree otherwise the rendering can fail. Here's a dynamic example used in conjunction with Extension:Simple Security which creates a tree which exhibits some links that are only visible for sysops.


 * Note: The tree-view code will remove any empty items so they can work conditionally like this.

Here's another example of a dynamic tree using the DPL extension to make a tree which draws its items from all the articles in the foo category.

The query uses some DPL parameters to ensure that the results are preceded by double asterisks so that the items can appear inside the root node. See also this example for a more advanced use of DPL with tree-view to create a menu which contains two levels of outgoing links from a given page, or incoming pages to a given page.

Sub-trees
Trees can be transcluded within other trees so we can define large trees from structures of smaller trees. Such sub-trees are defined using the following syntax:

In this example, an article called Tree2 is transcluded as an item in Tree1. Tree2 is defined as a normal tree starting at root which can be used elsewhere in the normal way. The tree-view code matches nested trees and adjusts them to the appropriate depth for them to seemlessly integrate into single whole tree. The class and other attributes of sub-trees are ignored and the whole tree renders in accord with the attributes of the root tree.

Adding a treeview to the sidebar (if using monobook skin)
One of the most common uses for the treeview is to replace the links in the sidebar with a tree. The following code can be added to your LocalSettings.php file after the treeview include line which allows a wiki article to be added to the sidebar below the toolbox. This example adds the article named "NavTree" which can contain your tree, or any other wikitext content you'd like in your sidebar such as user-specific bookmarks etc. If you want to also remove the existing toolbox and navigation links, you can use CSS as in the following example (the toolbox needs to be removed slightly more specifically than navigation because the tree-view renders inside its main div element):
 * You may also need to add width: 100%; in your tree-view CSS to fix IE alignment issues when adding to the sidebar.


 * There is more detail about manipulating sidebar content and its layout at Manual:Interface/Sidebar.

Sites using TreeAndMenu
Here's a list of wikis with the tree view installed:
 * OrganicDesign - MediaWiki version 1.10.0
 * http://www.peerix.org/Sandbox - MediaWiki version 1.6.10
 * http://www.wikifs.org/Sandbox - MediaWiki version 1.9.3
 * http://semeb.com/dpldemo - Demo website for two other MediaWiki Extensions
 * http://www.inmatelaw.org - Used to create law outlines
 * Citizendium - To redesign the sidebar and probably to organise content in some ways, see citizendium:CZ Talk:Treeview Extension
 * http://www.lamegira.com - MediaWiki version 1.13.2

Change Log
Refer to SVN for changes to TreeAndMenu.php, or to a historical revision of this article for change log and other information about older versions of this extension.