We are happy to announce the release of a new beta product, the PixoPoint Menu Animations plugin.

This new plugin adds a smooth animated effect to your dropdown menu. It was originally part of the PixoPoint Menu plugin, but was becoming too bloated and was only useful when using the other parts of the PixoPoint Menu plugin, not just the animations side of it. For a demonstration of it in action, just visit the menu on this very page!

Download

PixoPoint Menu Animations 0.2.1 beta

Features

The primary feature of the PixoPoint Menu Animations plugin is the addition of a smooth animated effect to your dropdown menu, but as always, the truly helpful stuff is in the details and this plugin has plenty of details (ie: options) to let you set your menu up the way you want it.

  • Slide down or slide-out effect
  • Speed of fade-in effect
  • Mouseover delay to control the delay time before the dropdown appears
  • Hide delay time to control the delay time before the dropdown disappears
  • Sensitivity to control how easily the menu appears or disappears. On low sensitivity, instead of immediately displaying the dropdown/flyout menu on mouseover, the menu will wait until the user’s mouse slows down before displaying it.
  • Arrow mark-up may be added to display any menu option which contains children.

The settings page for the PixoPoint Menu Animations plugin

Installation

After you’ve downloaded and extracted the files:

  1. Upload the complete `pixopoint-menu-animations` folder to the `/wp-content/plugins/` directory
  2. Activate the plugin through the ‘Plugins’ menu in WordPress
  3. Visit the “PixoPoint Animations” page in your WordPress settings menu to control how the menu animations behave via a plethora of different options
  4. Ensure that your theme uses a class of `sf-menu`

If your theme does not use a class of .sf-menu, you will need to add that class yourself. The Hybrid, Thematic and Genesis theme frameworks are supported automatically as is the PixoPoint Menu plugin.

Supported Themes

Any themes which use a class of .sf-menu on their menus unordered list will work with this plugin, however many themes already include the Superfish jQuery script which is used by our plugin. To avoid clashes with these other themes, we have intentionally deactivated the dropdown menu scripts in these themes. If you know of any themes which we could also add support for, please let us know!

The themes which are currently supported are:

PixoPoint Menu plugin (where it gets confusing)

Those of you who have used our PixoPoint Menu plugin or Multi-level Navigation plugin will likely recognise many of the features of this plugin. We were slowly adding so many features to the PixoPoint Menu plugin that it was becoming bloated, and many of those features (such as animations) were suitable for people who did not need the extra features of that plugin. So to simplify things, we have extracted out the code, turned it into a separate plugin and the final result is the PixoPoint Menu Animations plugin.

The current beta version of the PixoPoint Menu plugin includes the PixoPoint Menu animations plugin inside it for compatibility with previous versions, however in the future this will be removed and users wanting animation effects will need to install this plugin directly.

How come it’s not in the repo?

We are holding off adding this plugin to the official WordPress plugins repository until it and the new PixoPoint Menu plugin beta are ready for stable release. Rest assured, that once they are ready, they will be added into the official repository.

Support

All free support questions will be dealt with via our support forum. For paid support, please sign up for our Premium Support service.