I developed this PHP function for a project I'm working on. I'm posting it here in case I need it again, or in case you find it handy.

The function turns each line into an option tag making defining custom menus based on the contents of dynamically-given text files easy.

This could also be easily adapted to create navigations menus at the top of your pages with a few modifications to the HTML tags being used and some CSS to change the look of the list.

For instance, it would be nice if the data in the left column, 'Beauty Tips', could be different for each page. There are several ways to solve this, but for know I will choose the simplest.

He takes a few steps to make adding the content simple:

• Adding markers for the title and left menu to the template
• Change the OutputHandler class to make it less static
• use setData() to title the page
• user setData() to add left column content
• Use mark() and endmark() to section off a part of the template.

He's provided a demo and made the source code available for download.

One of the challenges many of us have faced before and will face in future is building a menu. Now this of course is very simple assuming that we're just shooting for a static <ul> with some <li>'s containing the links. However the tricky part is to figure out what is the active menu item. I had some code doing this in the past but tried out a new flavor of it today which I call the MacGyver menu for CakePHP as it's a little dirty yet powerful and easy to maintain.

In his included code, he creates a simple navigation from an array of titles/links and, with some sorting, a regular expression and a CSS class, the selected item can be highlighted simply.

Here is a quick way to build a popup menu supporting event registration from a GtkWidget. Menu items are passed to the class constructor as a list of labels. This class emits activate signals with full context (x,y coordinates, button ...).

There's the list of the steps that the code will follow and the two code chunks that will make it happen - the sample PHP-GTK app and the class file that handles the menu creation.

Just added a new class called Console, which wraps up some common Console script related functionality. All the methods are static, and it's PHP5 only. Methods include:

• Console::Pause()
• Console::BooleanQuestion()
• Console::ClearScreen()
• Console::GetLine()
• Console::ShowMenu()

You can grab a copy of the class here as well as an example of its usage, showing how to build a menu and have the user input their information...]]> Mon, 09 Jan 2006 06:51:35 -0600