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Create a menu

Until now, we learned how the page content is rendered; however, the page navigation is missing.

TYPO3 CMS offers a special menu object called HMENU ("H" stands for hierarchical) to easily build different kinds of menus.

We want our menu to be built like a nested list:

<ul class="level1">
   <li>first level</li>
   <li>first level
       <ul class="level2">
           <li>second level</li>
       </ul>
   </li>
   <li>first level</li>
</ul>

It is customary to declare new objects as sub-properties of the lib top-level object. We can give it any name that hasn't been assigned yet:

lib.textmenu = HMENU
lib.textmenu {

   # We define the first level as text menu.
   1 = TMENU

   # We define the normal state ("NO").
   1.NO = 1
   1.NO.allWrap = <li>|</li>

   # We define the active state ("ACT").
   1.ACT = 1
   1.ACT.wrapItemAndSub = <li>|</li>

   # Wrap the whole first level.
   1.wrap = <ul class="level1">|</ul>

   # The second and third level should be configured exactly
   # the same way.
   # In between the curly brackets, objects can be copied.
   # With the dot "." we define that the object can be found
   # in the brackets.
   # With 2.wrap and 3.wrap we overwrite the wrap, which was
   # copied from 1.wrap.
   2 < .1
   2.wrap = <ul class="level2">|</ul>
   3 < .1
   3.wrap = <ul class="level3">|</ul>
}

The HMENU object allows us to create a diversity of menus. The main properties are numbers and correspond to the menu level.

The TMENU object renders a menu level as text. There also exists a GMENU object which renders a menu level using images generated on the fly. A different rendering can be chosen for each menu level.

On every menu level, we can configure various states for the single menu items – see menu items, e.g. NO for "normal", ACT for "pages in the root line" (i.e. the current page, its parent, grandparent, and so forth) or CUR for "the current page".

Important

Except for the normal state (NO), other states have to be activated before they get displayed (i.e. ACT = 1).

Now that our menu is defined, we can use it with:

page.5 < lib.textmenu