Create a multilevel Dropdown menu with CSS and improve it via jQuery
Some of you might have noticed, I have a partiality for sleek menus. As I recently had to create a multi level dropdown menu for one of my customers, I wanted to improve it with a little bit of jQuery, but couldn’t find a script that accomplished what I needed.
So I decided to build this menu from scratch and share my thoughts as well as the code with you.
So before we start: this is what we are going to build
The first part of this tutorial is dedicated to the task of building a working CSS-only dropdown menu (also known as suckerfish menu), the second part will show you how you can pimp the whole thing with a few lines of jQuery.
The CSS-only menu is cross browser tested and from what I can tell works with all browsers except for IE6.
The Internet Explorer needs the addition of our jQuery function to work properly.
To create a CSS-only dropdown menu that works without Javascript (even in IE6), you need tons of extra markup and CSS, if you really need this for any reason check out Stu Nicholls CSSplay, he addresses this problem with heavy (ab)use of conditional comments =)
Now that you have a little bit of background information, lets create our own menu:
First of all we need the XHTML Structure of our soon-to-be terrific menu. We will use a nested list for this purpose, top level list id is “nav”:
<ul id="nav">
<li><a href="#">1 HTML</a></li>
<li><a href="#">2 CSS</a></li>
<li><a href="#">3 Javascript</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="#">3.1 jQuery</a>
<ul>
<li><a href="#">3.1.1 Download</a></li>
<li><a href="#">3.1.2 Tutorial</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a href="#">3.2 Mootools</a></li>
<li><a href="#">3.3 Prototype</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
Thats it for the HTML part; without CSS styling our menu looks like this: Step 1
Now for the stylesheet part:
#nav, #nav ul{
margin:0;
padding:0;
list-style-type:none;
list-style-position:outside;
position:relative;
line-height:1.5em;
}
This removes the indents browsers tend to make, as well as the bullets from #nav and all its child-ul elements. The “position:relative” is needed since we will arrange some of the contained elements with position:relative and absolute. This is necessary since relative and absolute positioned elements are positioned according to their containing blocks with a position attribute, other then static.
Line-height defines the height of each list item. You could set the height attribute for your list-items to define their height, but line-height will center the link text vertically without the need to play with margins and paddings.
#nav a:link, #nav a:active, #nav a:visited{
display:block;
padding:0px 5px;
border:1px solid #333;
color:#fff;
text-decoration:none;
background-color:#333;
}
#nav a:hover{
background-color:#fff;
color:#333;
}
This one is pretty straight forward:
it will style each hyper link in our menu a little bit. At this time the menu looks like this: Step 2
Now lets add some more styles:
#nav li{
float:left;
position:relative;
}
This will align our list elements horizontally.
#nav ul {
position:absolute;
width:12em;
top:1.5em;
display:none;
}
This will position the nested Lists right beyond the main menu and give them a width of 12em. The width attribute is needed so that the list items within display vertically again. The Top attribute should have the same value as the line-height attribute we defined for #nav.
#nav li ul a{
width:12em;
float:left;
}
This will set the width of the hyper links to 12 em (which in combination with the width of the UL set above results in a horizontally displayed sub menu, despite of the ongoing float:left)
#nav ul ul{
top:auto;
}
#nav li ul ul {
left:12em;
margin:0px 0 0 10px;
}
#nav li:hover ul ul, #nav li:hover ul ul ul, #nav li:hover ul ul ul ul{
display:none;
}
#nav li:hover ul, #nav li li:hover ul, #nav li li li:hover ul, #nav li li li li:hover ul{
display:block;
}
#nav ul ul and #nav li ul ul define where we display the sub menus.
The hover states define which items we want to show when hovering over an item (only the next sub level, not all of them)
After applying these styles we got this menu: Step3
If you are working with a browser other than IE6 you should have a basic dropdown menu now.
Gogo jQuery!
So lets spice up the menu a little bit. First of all here is the whole jQuery Code I used to create the effect:
function mainmenu(){
$(" #nav ul ").css({display: "none"}); // Opera Fix
$(" #nav li").hover(function(){
$(this).find('ul:first').css({visibility: "visible",display: "none"}).show(400);
},function(){
$(this).find('ul:first').css({visibility: "hidden"});
});
}
$(document).ready(function(){
mainmenu();
});
Step by step description:
$(" #nav ul ").css({display: "none"}); // Opera Fix
This is a small fix for Opera, which doesn’t hide the menus fast enough, if you hover above them and so creates a flickering effect. $(” #nav ul “) is the jQuery way to select all unordered lists in #nav. Usage of this is similar to selecting CSS elements. The .css({display:”none”}) sets the display attribute for all Unordered lists to none.
$(" #nav li").hover(function(){ // here goes mouse over effect
},function(){ // here goes mouse out effect
});
This is the jQuery function for hovering. Really simple to use: first function lets you define what happens when you hover over a specific item( in our case a list item), second function is used for the mouse out event.
$(this).find('ul:first:hidden').css({visibility: "visible",display: "none"}).show(400);
This function finds the first hidden unordered list within the currently hovered list item and shows it. The function “.show” works only under specific circumstances, this is why we set the display to none. The number between the braces defines the animation speed in milliseconds.
$(this).find('ul:first').css({visibility: "hidden"});
This is the mouse out event: we use visibility instead of display since the show function mentioned above, sets display to “block” at the end of the animation. This way if you would hover just a short moment over the item the item would not display for the ongoing animation and then pop out all of a sudden. Using visibility prevents this flickering.
$(document).ready(function(){
mainmenu();
});
This function will call our mainmenu() function as soon as the html document is ready.
We are done now, if you can’t get this to work for any reason, here is a working example for download:
Includes: HTML File, CSS File, Javscript Files
Have fun creating your own menu ;)
Update :
I have added some small fixes to the script which were suggested by some of my readers, so thanks for adding improvements. ;)
Another thing I wanted to note: I have seen this script in many templates and wordpress themes now, often used in conjunction with one of wordpress automatic list generating features (wp_list_categories, wp_list_pages)
If you use it that way wordpress adds a title attribute to each link, which can create a flickering effect when the browser tooltip for the title appears. If you are using the script this way you should add the following line of jquery at the beggining of the script to remove the titles:
$(" #nav a").removeAttr("title");
(Last updated 18.09.2008)
hey! thanks for this one but, I have a problem. the menus display below select tags. The same is true for ajax calendars. I tried putting a z-index on all the uls and lis but it still displays below select tags.
Got a workaround for this?
Thank you. I love your tutorial. thumb up++
If anyone figures out a way to highlight the parent text color and not just the background as per Milamber’s suggestion (https://kriesi.at/archives/create-a-multilevel-dropdown-menu-with-css-and-improve-it-via-jquery#comment-2916), please post it!
I used the “Create a multilevel Dropdown menu with CSS and improve it via jQuery” on a site I am developing for a client. I changed the menu to the specifications I needed. Everything works fine in all versions of IE. However, the dropdown doesn’t work in Safari and Firefox. Here is the link to where the site is temporarily posted. http://www.applet19.com. As I was troubleshooting I discovered the problem lies with the way I reordered the list. Is there something in the javascript(jquery) file that causes this to happen? I need someone to post a solution as soon as possible. The client is growing impatient. Thanks for all of your help.
Nice tutorial.. hope i can ask you some question regarding web development..
Wow great stuff… This is what i have been looking for. Thanks
It works fine on my version of Firefox 1.5.0.1 Perhaps you don’t have the latest version. I run an image gallery myself, but I don’t think type of layout would artı work very well for me as I have descriptions for my images and some of the images are quite large. I don’t know, it might be worth experimenting with.
Firstly Kriesi, big thanks to you, I looked for ages trying to find a robust dynamic menu system, and this one fit the bill perfectly.
Just one thing, is there any compatibility issues with newer versions of jQuery? I tried switching to 1.3.2 but couldn’t get the menu to work.
hidden is calculated was changed in jQuery 1.3.2 (see http://docs.jquery.com/Selectors/hidden and http://docs.jquery.com/Release:jQuery_1.3.2#:visible.2F:hidden_Overhauled)
The code below works fine for me now :
$(“#menuBar li”).hover(function(){
$(this).find(‘ul:first:hidden’).css({‘visibility’:’visible’,’display’:”none”}).fadeIn(400);
},function(){ $(this).find(‘ul:first’).css({‘visibility’:’hidden’,’display’:”none”});
});}
I added ‘display’:”none” when rollout
Hello
I like the tutorial and have it working on firefox and I am still having problem for it to work on IE when mouseover nothing happens just highlights the tab.
I read that some posters did have it working on IE I would be very glad if someone who has it working help.
I have it here on a test website that is a phpnuke CMS
http://www.phpnukeblog.com/html
I have the menu working on IE7 and now I need to figure the way to position in center any help will be appreciated
Nice tutorial.
I found that in FF 3.x, the Opera fix that you put in has the effect that when you move the mouse out of the top LI element, the sub menu is hidden again. I don’t get why that is, because if you are hovering over the sub menu, strictly you are hovering over the LI as well.
I also did not really notice the Opera problem the fix was intended for.
When I changed the fix to the following, it worked again:
$(” #nav > ul “).css({display: “none”}); // Opera Fix
Considering that nobody else commented about this, I must have another css issue which makes the sub menu disappear too soon. I’m building this into an existing site, so it’s not as ‘clean slate’ as I’d like.
As soon as I have it up on my domain, I’ll drop the link so you can take a peek.
All in all, thanks for this.
For those having issues with jQuery 1.3.2 it’s b/c they changed how jQuery sees things as hidden see here
The menu was just showing up once for me, but once the visibility was changed to hidden it wouldn’t appear again. I just removed the :hidden portion and all worked fine.
Thanks for sharing. it’s super cool.
Gavin’s fix for jQuery 1.3.2 worked for me, too–change
$(this).find(‘ul:first:hidden’)
in the first function passed to the hover function to
$(this).find(‘ul:first’)
After i saw that lot of people asked how to create with highlighted previous levels and lot of them gave half of answers i created full XD.
Link: http://rapidshare.com/files/235497431/dropdown.zip //virus free
Tested and working on: Firefox 3.0, 3.1b3, Internet Explorer 6, 7, 8, Opera 9.0, 9.6 and Safari 3.0 on XP SP3
P.S. Plz Kriesi if you could upload on your website.
Thanks a million, pals,
SMASHING menu, I’d say.
I am enjoying this menu, it does help me a lot, however, here is a problem of mine:
How can I add a down-arrow for the vertical menus, and add a right-arrow for the horizontal menus?
I’d like to express my gratitude, thanks heaps!
Best Regards,
chinalwb
2009-05-26 09:30 AM