I have recently been working on re-skinning the Simply Lights website which was created (before I got my mits on it) using the osCommerce PHP/MySQL script. osCommerce has been around for years and is one of the most popular shopping cart systems available. It includes thousands of mods/plug-ins which are available to download and install either for free or for a small fee, one of which is Dynamenu which I have installed on the Simply Lights website. The reason I am posting it here is because it took me a good half a day of searching and testing to find a suitable mod that would simply create a DHTML drop down navigation menu and Dynamenu was by far the easiest and best from the selection I downloaded, and the best thing of all, it’s free.

The options allow you to choose the appearance of your navigation menu and includes the options of a horizontal drop-down, a vertical flyout, a tree menu (collapsible folders like windows explorer), a plain (without drop downs) horizontal menu or a plain vertical menu. To install Dynamenu you simply have to upload some files, change a few config settings and drop a line of PHP into the section of your page template where you want the menu to appear. Then it is just a case of restyling the CSS to suit your design.

I’m not a huge fan of osCommerce, I much prefer CubeCart, but once you understand how the files are structured then it becomes fairly easy to modify the PHP/HTML code and CSS.

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