So it took a while but I finally finished the vertical css menu builder. It comes after yet another re-write of the menu builder core class and lots of hair pulling.
You can choose from 24 background images and 33 pointer images and combine them as you see fit. This gives you almost 800 different combinations, though not all of them might look good. Of course this is without taking into consideration that you may also choose an endless combination of colors, rounded corners, width and text alignment, so there should be a possibility of having some fun with this new release.
There are also a few kudos I would like to give, since I could not be this creative by myself. Some of the menus have been inspired by the menus found on e-lusion.com, dynamicdrive.com and cssdrive.com, so thank you very much for sharing your ideas.
Furthermore I implemented the Antialiased filled Arcs/Ellipses functions found on mierendo.com to give smoother roundness in some of the background images. Thank you very much for this great function, much appreciated.
So I guess that is about all I have to say about that, so why not just start building your own vertical css menu.
I would like to apologize to all that came here using IE7 expecting to see some menus and then, disappointingly, seeing nothing at all, thinking “what’s up with this guy, promising us free menus and delivering nothing!”.
After more or less 3 hours of editing the site to be able to display the menus in IE7, while hitting my head against the table and looking very angry, I found that the error was one line. Yup, the IE stylesheet was only active for Internet Explorers below 7, but I have now changed that. I’m a little disappointed in me for not checking that first, but anyway, I apologize for this inconvenience to the visitors.
There are still some minor errors in IE7, while viewing some of the pages, you might notice that the footer area get locked under parts of the menus. This is also something that some might consider unprofessional and for that I am sorry, as soon as I have some time from making menu builders for the site, I will fix this.
In the meantime, if this really bothers you, I suggest using Firefox to view the beauty of the site, without errors.
The horizontal css menu image generator has been completely re-written to generate smoother corners on the rounded tab images. Furthermore the improved class should be able to load the images faster, while the users customizes the menu.
Hopefully the new smoother images will make the css menus generated by the builder more attractive for website owners to use, since the menus do not have that grainy look anymore.
Since the re-write also changed the way the arcs are created on some of the menu images, the below illustration, does not show the comparison between the arcs.
Note:
An error in the stylesheet found when the menu was downloaded via the zip file has also been corrected. One of the background style for the active menu image pointed to the wrong location, causing the menu to appear incomplete.
To improve the quality of the css breadcrumb menu images, 5 pixels with different alpha transparency have been added to each corner to give the images a smoother look.
The image below illustrates the change to the images, comparing one of the old images to one of the new.
