Subooa Studios Blog » dropdown http://blog.subooa.com Custom development by Chris Duell aka duellsy Wed, 28 Jul 2010 03:57:28 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.0 Creating a Dropdown Menu with jQuery and CSS http://blog.subooa.com/development/html_and_css/creating-a-dropdown-menu-with-jquery-and-css/ http://blog.subooa.com/development/html_and_css/creating-a-dropdown-menu-with-jquery-and-css/#comments Mon, 06 Jul 2009 10:59:31 +0000 Chris Duell http://blog.subooa.com/?p=324

The raw base

To start off with, we’re going to at least need some sort of menu structure to get us going. For this, the best way to structure the menu is using an unordered list (ul), nesting your submenus as you go. Below is the example we’re going to use in this demo it its raw unstyled format.

(The running demo is here – http://blog.subooa.com/example/css_jquery_dropdown.html)

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<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html>
	<head>
		<title>Creating a dropdown menu with jQuery and CSS</title>
	</head>
</html>
<div id="mainmenu">
	<ul>
		<li><a href="#">Menu item 1</a>
			<ul>
				<li><a href="#">Submenu item 1</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">Submenu item 1</a></li>
			</ul>
		</li>
		<li><a href="#">Menu item 2</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Menu item 3</a></li>
		<li><a href="#">Menu item 4</a>
			<ul>
				<li><a href="#">Submenu item 4.1</a></li>
				<li><a href="#">Submenu item 4.2</a></li>
			</ul>
		</li>
		<li><a href="#">Menu item 5</a></li>
	</ul>
</div>
</body>
</html>

Opening that in a browser is going to be pretty plain, something like this:
raw_menu

A little css

For the sake of this tutorial we’re only going to give the menu a basic look and not get too fancy. So we’ll just create a nice green and black menu.

The nav we are going to create is going to be a left to right manu, with the second level popping out below its parent, so we first need to order the items left to right and get the submenu it the right position. (To keep it simple, the style is going to be added to the same file and not extracted into a saperate stylesheet)

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	<style type="text/css">
 
		body{
			margin: 0px;
			font-family: Arial, Verdana, Helvetica, Sans-Serif;
		}
 
		#mainmenu ul{
			width: 100%;
			height: 30px;
			background-color: #393;
			margin: 0px;
			padding: 0px;
			font-size: 12px;
		}
			#mainmenu ul li{
				float: left;
				list-style: none;
				margin: 0px;
				position: relative;
				height: 30px;
				width: 100px;
			}
				#mainmenu ul li a{
					display: block;
					padding: 0px 10px;
					height: 30px;
					line-height: 30px;
					color: #FFF;
					text-decoration: none;
					border-right: 1px solid #363;
					border-left: 1px solid #3c3;
				}
 
				#mainmenu ul li ul{
					width: 170px;
					position: absolute;
					left: 0px;
					float: left;
					clear: left;
				}
					#mainmenu ul li ul li{
						background-color: #000;
					}
						#mainmenu ul li.hover ul li a{
							border-width: 0px;
							border-bottom: 1px solid #CCC;
							background-color: #000;
							height: 29px;
							width: 150px;
						}	
	</style>

style_no_js

Hiding the submenu

Now that the menu is working and displaying as we want it to, now we need to hide the submenu by default and setup the style for the hover state.

Change the left value for the “#mainmenu ul li ul” class to be off the screen somewhere (we’re using -12000px here) and add a new hover class for the list item, which moves the ul back to where we just had it when the user hovers over the main menu item.

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				#mainmenu ul li ul{
					width: 170px;
					position: absolute;
					left: -12000px;
					float: left;
					clear: left;
				}
 
					#mainmenu ul li.hover ul{
						left: 0px;
					}

Adding the jQuery event… the fun part

Up to this point, the file could run as a standalone HTML file, and with a little extra CSS could actually work in a lot of browsers, but there are many out there that don’t support using the “:hover” on list items, so we need to make use of some javascript to tell the browser to react when the user hovers over the main menu items. So first step here is to actually load the jQuery javascript:

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	<script src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.1/jquery.min.js" type="text/javascript"></script>
	<script type="text/javascript">
		jQuery.noConflict();
	</script>

(The no conflict line has been added in cases where people may already be calling a javascript file that makes use of $, it prevents us from running into any javascript code conflicts)

And now here is where the magic happens, using jQuery you can ‘chain’ function calls one after the other without having to do each function call on an element on its own line which cuts down the file size and keeps things neat and together.

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	<script type="text/javascript">
		jQuery.noConflict();
 
		jQuery(document).ready(function(){
			jQuery('#mainmenu').find('li').mouseenter(function(){
				jQuery(this).addClass('hover');
			}).mouseleave(function(){
				jQuery(this).removeClass('hover');
			});
		});
 
	</script>

Finally, just to top things off we need to add some hover colors to the menu items.

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				#mainmenu ul li.hover a{
					background-color: #3c3;
				}
				#mainmenu ul li ul li.hover a{
					background-color: #333;
				}

final_dropdown_menu

And that’s it, a fully functional CSS dropdown using jQuery. In a later article, I’ll cover adding a slight animation and also adding multiple levels of dropdowns.

Demo and full code

Here’s the running demo – http://blog.subooa.com/example/css_jquery_dropdown.html
In case you got a little lost along the way, you can download the full code here to play with – css_jquery_dropdown.zip

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