Provide a more traditional menu option for medium sized websites

[tisto]

We currently have two options for the fat menu:

• fat menu that opens on click: well suited for large websites, consistent behavior across devices (mobile and desktop)
• no menu at all (only suitable for very small websites)

There are two possible other options we might want to consider:

• fat menu that opens on hover (like on fz-juelich.de). The downside is that mobile and desktop behave differently and that the UX is not very good
• traditional menu that only expands when there is content

Discussions on community.plone.org

• https://community.plone.org/t/dropdown-menu-behaviour-for-nav-navigation-volto/20380
• https://community.plone.org/t/volto-light-theme-fat-menu-how-to-make-some-navigation-items-go-to-the-item-on-first-click/19601

[tkimnguyen]

I don't know how you'd implement this in Volto but on the Plone side I can imagine a catalog index that tells you how many contained items something has, and if that number is 0 then the click takes you to it, otherwise it shows the fat menu and the contained items. One could argue either way that this is or isn't "more" consistent UI behaviour...

[tisto]

If I recall correctly, @fredvd and/or @davisagli looked into creating an index for this. I guess we should make sure there is a PLIP for this.

[davisagli]

There was some discussion of an index like this (actually it would be a metadata column) for a different use case (showing a folder icon in the contents view) at the Beethoven Sprint a couple years ago, but I don't remember if anyone started implementing it. The trick is figuring out how to update the index when the number of contained items changes from 0 to 1 or 1 to 0, but avoid unnecessary index updates otherwise.

[tisto]

@davisagli right. Thanks for the update. I guess we should write a PLIP then so that we do not forget about this. This metadata column would indeed be useful for both use cases. Can you imagine writing a PLIP for this?