Extension:TreeAndMenu

MediaWiki extensions manual

TreeAndMenu Release status: stable
Implementation	Parser function , Skin
Description	Creates dynamic dropdown and folder tree menus
Author(s)	Aran Dunkley (Nadtalk)
Latest version	4.2.5 (2021-10-31)
MediaWiki	1.39.x
Database changes	No
License	GNU General Public License 2.0 only
Download	GitHub: project page git repository URL [help ] commit history Note: No localisation updates are provided by translatewiki.net .
Example	organicdesign.co.nz
Parameters $wgTreeAndMenuSidebarMenuPage $wg@ $wgTreeAndMenuSidebarMenuHeading $wgTreeAndMenuPersistIfId
Hooks used SkinBuildSidebar

The TreeAndMenu extension makes bullet lists into folder trees or dynamic drop-down menus.

The drop-down menu functionality uses Son of Suckerfish, which is 99% CSS. The tree component is now using the FancyTree jQuery plugin rather than the dTree used in the previous version of the TreeAndMenu extension. The new FancyTree has many options and plugins and is very extendable. Please view the site and examples for more details.

New features using FancyTree jQuery plugin

• Works natively with UL/LI structures, which allows the PHP code to be much simpler
• Supports Ajax loading of sub-nodes
• Works in preview and diff pages, even live preview
• Much more extendable and has many other extensions written for it
• Actively developed code

Installation

• Download and place the file(s) in a directory called TreeAndMenu in your extensions/ folder.
• Add the following code at the bottom of your LocalSettings.php file:

  wfLoadExtension( 'TreeAndMenu' );
  

•  Done – Navigate to Special:Version on your wiki to verify that the extension is successfully installed.

Usage

As in the following examples, trees and menus are created by surrounding normal nested bullet list syntax with a parser function.

{{#tree:
*Item
**[[Sub-item link]]
**Another sub-item
}}

{{#menu:
*Menu item
**[[Sub-menu with link]]
**Another sub-menu item
}}

{{#tree: id=siteTree | class=navTree | root=Organic Design |
*Item
**[[Sub-item link]]
**Another sub-item
}}

The TreeAndMenu extension packages the tree with the ExtPersist plugin, which maintains the tree's state across page loads. To activate it use the following syntax:

{{#tree: extensions=["persist"] |
*Item
**[[Sub-item link]]
**Another sub-item
}}

The value of the extensions parameter is JSON, so the quotes must be double, not single. Other plugins can be added like this, but you'll need to load the JavaScript yourself.

Options can also be passed to the FancyTree code as well like this example (full list of available options here):

{{#tree: minExpandLevel=2 |
*Item
**[[Sub-item link]]
**Another sub-item
}}

FancyTree options can also be passed to individual nodes with JSON syntax as follows, id and class values are put directly into the li element, and all other JSON data is passed to the FancyTree code via a data-json attribute. Note that property names must also be quoted, not just values.

{{#tree:
*Item
**{"expanded":true, "id":"MyExpandedNode"} [[Sub-item link]]
**Another sub-item
}}

The following options are recognized: active, expanded, focus, folder, lazy, selected, unselectable

Styles

The style of trees is defined using CSS by adding the rules to your MediaWiki:Common.css page. For example, I use the following on my site to make the text and icons more like the last version of TreeAndMenu.

.fancytree ul {
    background: none;
    border: none;
    font-size: 12px;
}
ul.fancytree-container {
    outline: 0;
    border: none;
    overflow: hidden;
}
.fancytree p {
    display: none;
}
span.fancytree-title {
    cursor: default;
}
span.fancytree-title a {
    color: black;
}

Dynamic Trees and Menus

You can use transclusion to embed the content of trees from other articles or dynamically manipulate the content. For example, a DPL query could generate the body of a treeview statement. Articles containing trees should not have any whitespace above the wikitex markup specifying the parser function tree {{#tree:...}} otherwise the rendering can fail. Here's a dynamic example used in conjunction with Extension:ExtraMagic, which creates a tree that exhibits some links that are only visible for sysops.

 {{#tree:
 * [[Main Page]]
 * [[Special:Recentchanges|Recent changes]]
 * {{#ifgroup:sysop|Admin}}
 * {{#ifgroup:sysop|Logs}}
 * {{#ifgroup:sysop|Tasks}}
 }}

• Note: The tree-view code will remove any empty items so they can work conditionally like this.

Here's another example of a dynamic tree using the DPL extension to make a tree which draws its items from all the articles in the foo category.

 {{#tree:
 * Articles in [[:Category:Foo]]
 {{#dpl:category=Foo|format=,**,[[%PAGE%]]\n,}}
 }}

The query uses some DPL parameters to ensure that the results are preceded by double asterisks so that the items can appear inside the root node. See also this example for more advanced use of DPL with tree-view to create a menu that contains two levels of outgoing links from a given page or incoming pages to a given page.

Sub-trees

NOTE: This feature isn't working correctly in version 4.x. The transcluded content can only work with bullet lists and must use the correct depth, as the dynamic queries are doing in the previous section.

Trees can be transcluded within other trees so we can define large trees from structures of smaller trees. Such sub-trees are defined using the following syntax:

{{#tree:
*Tree1
**Item1
***Sub item1
**{{:Tree2}}
**Item3
}}

In this example, an article called Tree2 is transcluded as an item in Tree1. Tree2 may be another tree or a normal bullet list, if it's a tree, then the attributes and options are ignored and the whole tree renders in accord with the attributes and options of the root tree.

Loading nodes with Ajax

The new FancyTree jQuery plugin supports Ajax loading of nodes. The TreeAndMenu extension makes this accessible by passing an ajax option to FancyTree using the JSON syntax shown above. The value of the ajax option is the URL to retrieve the data containing the child nodes.

The URL is expected to contain either another tree, a plain bullet list, or a JSON formatted array of nodes. Each node is an object containing a title, an optional href key, and an optional children array of sub-nodes. If the "ajax" option's value is not an absolute or relative URL, then it is assumed to be an article title, and its content will be retrieved with action=render.

{{#tree:
*Item-1
*{"ajax":"http://foo.bar/baz?foobas=1"} Item-2
*Item-3
}}

Adding a tree to the sidebar

One of the most common uses of this extension is adding a tree menu to the sidebar. This is easy if you're using your own custom skin, but if you want to do it without modifying the skin code, you can use the following method.

This creates a div element (addressable with CSS by the "wikitext-sidebar" id attribute) containing the parsed content from the MediaWiki:SidebarTree article (it's best not to use the default MediaWiki:Sidebar article for this as it can cause some problems). You can then use some JavaScript added to your MediaWiki:Common.js to move the element into a more appropriate location in the page DOM. For example, the following JavaScript snippet inserts the rendered wikitext below the site logo.

$(document).ready( function() {
  let tree = $('#wikitext-sidebar');
  $('#p-logo').after( tree.html() );
  tree.remove();
});

Opening a tree to the current page

The following example can be added to your MediaWiki:Common.js, it waits until the document is ready, then adds an event to a tree (selected by its id attribute, in this case #tree) so that when the tree is initialised it calls a helper function called makeTitleVisible which reveals and activates the first node linking to the current page.

$(document).ready( function() {
    $('#tree').bind('fancytreeinit', function(event, data) {
        data.tree.makeTitleVisible();
    });
});

If necessary, surround the {{#tree...}} code with a <div> element like:

<div id="tree">{{#tree: 
...
}}</div>