A week ago I got a little tired of dealing with the Core menus offered with DotNetNuke.  I decided I needed something better.  I am a web standards guy and I really wanted something that would spit out unordered lists of my menus, so I could style them however I wanted with CSS.

I looked around and there were two possibilities that I could find and that were recommended.  HouseMenu by House of Nuke and CSS NavMenu by Snapsis.

I checked out House of Nuke first mainly because I had heard of it in the DNN community more than Snapsis.   After cruising their website for a few minutes, and I realized that if I was using DNN 5.01, I might have an issue with HouseMenu.  The reason I say this is that there is a forum post that has been unanswered from three months ago in regards to whether or not anyone has gotten HouseMenu to work with DNN 5.

I am not saying anything bad about House of Nuke.  They have done some great things from what I have heard.  It just looks like they are a bit behind in updates.

My next step was to check out Snapsis.  I cruised their site and they had a lot of examples and demos.  This was great to run against Firebug so I see what was really happening behind the scenes.  This provided me with the ability to see what markup was going to be used and let me figure out what my limitations might be with CSS styling. (if any)

After about an hour of research I decided to buy.

Today I was very glad I bought the CSS NavMenu.  It is very simple to use and allows for some great options.  I can even choose (via different properties to the Snapsis:NavMenu control in the skin) what exact parts I want to display on my menu.   This was great for the menu I was doing today. 

My customer wanted me to create a vertical list menu that only displayed the children of a certain top level menu item. (Services)  By adding the IncludeTabs property and then the ShowType=”ChildrenOnly” property I could do exactly that.

<Snapsis:NavMenu id="SellNav" Level="1-1" CacheTabs="False"
                            NavType="Tabs"
                            IncludeTabs="Services" ShowType="ChildrenOnly" runat="server" />

Then all I had to do was style the list and viola, it was done.

So all in all I have been very impressed with Snapsis and their menus.  Some day I will do some tutorials on this site for those who want to do some more complicated menus.