OWW-LabMaker:Projects/Horizontal Navigator/version 2

Making A Good-looking OWW Lab Without a PhD. in Wikification: Update.
The original extension worked well. But the syntax left a LOT to be desired. The use of the pipe (|) characters and the other parameters was consistent and did provide the basis for reimplementing most menus already used for labs in OpenWetWare. All non-repeating parameters have now been moved into attribute tags within the tag.

This means that the only content enclosed by the tag itself is the items that make up the contents of a horizontal menu.

We have a number of new labs being created on OWW. To make life a bit easier, OWW now has a MediaWiki extension that will take care of many of the problems people have had with both creating consistent pages and navigation to go between them.

Motivation
The original version met the goal of providing a way to use a complex but useful CSS-dropdown navigation within OWW without exposing the details to teams who use the site. The syntax looked a bit formidable. The new version is functionally equivalent to the orignal. However, it achieves this with a much cleaner syntax.

The OWW Menu Tag
The tag used is " ". The tag is inserted in any OWW page. When present, a menu is displayed, linking a lab's set of wiki pages together.

What Needs to Be Specified in The Tag
Using this tag, this is what's needed to create horizontal menu:


 * A header image loaded into OWW (or one somewhere else for now!),
 * Some information about the colors you choose to display
 * The font to be displayed
 * A name for your lab
 * A list of pages and names you want to identify the pages with

The Template Tag: Shorthand for the Menu Definition
To insert this into a page, the actual tag and set of parameters can be enclosed in a single location. In OWW, pages called 'Templates' can be used as a shortcut for long sets of repeating steps that take up space and make it hard to change things once you have completed your lab site.

Example: Bishop Lab
Let's use the Bishop Lab at Harvard as an example. A template that would allow you to drop a horizontal menu into your lab pages would look like this:

 

In other words, a single tag is all that would be needed to render the full menu, with an embedded graphic, into your pages.

Creating the Tag
The definition for the BishopMenu menu would be entered into a template page. You can see the page here:

 Template:BishopMenu

This definition is only entered once. If you change it, all of the pages it is included in will be updated. This makes adding a new page a lot easier than it has been.

Syntax
The content of the owwmenu tag looks like this:

 

   Home=Lab-Home

   Lab Members=People

   Research=#,Ongoing=Ongoing Research, Government=Government Sponsored

   Protocols=#, Human=Protocols/Human, Bovine=Protocols/Bovine

   Equipment=#, Scanners=Equipment#Scanners, Detectors=Equipment#Scanners

   Notebooks=#, Retinal Scan=Notebook/Retinal_Image_Scanner

   Links=#, Sponsors= http://www.agency.gov, Friends= http://openwetware.org 

 

Description of the Revised Tag
This tag is used to set the following:

To see the evolving version of this page in OWW, click here.