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Using jQueryUI Accordion to Create a Vertical Menu

5.00/5 (4 votes)
6 Mar 2013CPOL1 min read 48.4K  
Some notes on how to quickly create a vertical menu with the help of jQueryUI

Introduction

A majority of web applications need a navigation menu and there are a lot of plug-ins out there to create a great menu. In my case, I had to create a vertical navigation menu with some expanding and collapsing behavior.

There are a lot of solutions for creating such a menu. I was already using jQueryUI and decided to use the Accordion for this purpose. This is what happened… Let's say that we have a simple site where we have home, projects, and About me pages and we need to create a vertical navigation menu for it using jQueryUI.

Using the Code

The first step was to create an Accordion with the navigation links:

HTML
<div id="navigationMenu"> 
    <h3> <a href="#"> Home </a> </h3>
    <div> </div>
    <h3><a href="#"> Projects</a></h3> 
    <div> 
       <ul> 
          <li> <a href="#1"> Project 1</a> </li>
          <li> <a href="#2"> Project 2 </a> </li>
          <li> <a href="#3"> Project 3 </a> </li>
       </ul>
    </div>
    <h3> <a href="#"> About me</a></h3>
    <div></div>
</div>

We have to initialize the navigationMenu as an Accordion:

JavaScript
$(function () {
   //initializing the accordion
   $('#navigationMenu').accordion({
        collapsible: true,
        navigation: true,
        clearStyle: true
    });
});

OK, now we can add some code for customizing the navigation accordion. Let's decorate the menu headers and divs that don’t need to be collapsible and single with a class="single-menu-item" for headers and class="single-menu-container" for the divs:

HTML
<div id="navigationMenu"> 
  <h3 class="single-menu-item"> <a href="#"> Home </a> </h3>
  <div class="single-menu-container"> </div>
  <h3><a href="#"> Projects</a></h3> 
  <div> 
      <ul> 
          <li> <a href="#1"> Project 1</a> </li>
          <li> <a href="#2"> Project 2 </a> </li>
          <li> <a href="#3"> Project 3 </a> </li>
     </ul>
 </div>
 <h3 class="single-menu-item"> <a href="#"> About me</a></h3>
 <div class="single-menu-container"></div>
</div>

We unbind the click event from the single-menu element:

JavaScript
$(function () {
    //initializing the accordion
     ...
 
     $('.single-menu-item').unbind('click');
});

And as a last step, we have to create some CSS rules for single-menu-item and single-menu-container that will rewrite the standard behavior of the jQuery accordion:

CSS
#navigationMenu{ width: 270px; }
  .single-menu-item .ui-icon {display: none !important;}
  .single-menu-container {display: none !important;}

This was the last step.

Now we have a vertical navigation menu! You can find the code of this example here.

If you have a great example of implementing a vertical navigation menu with jQuery, please provide the links in the comments section.

License

This article, along with any associated source code and files, is licensed under The Code Project Open License (CPOL)