Replies
You’re most welcome.
So, because this theme extends the native navigation functionality in Discourse these features will not be available right away.
Sub-menus are not within the scope of this theme and even if I get something to work it would not be optimal. I think a separate theme component works better for this.
As far as opening links in a new tab, the assumption is that your navigation links will point to pages on your site and so there’s no built-in functionality to open top nav links in a new tab. However, you can do something like:
This is very rudimentary
<script type="text/discourse-plugin" version="0.8.18">
api.onPageChange(() => {
$("#navigation-bar a").each(function() {
var a = new RegExp("/" + window.location.host + "/");
if (!a.test(this.href)) {
$(this).attr("target", "_blank");
}
});
});
</script>
What this will do is check if a nav link points to an external site and then opens it in a new tab instead. This could be vastly improved but will have to do until I have a bit more time to refine it.
New features!
Thanks to incredible contributions by @Simon_Cossar 
This component will now automatically check the page you’re on and highlight it. This matches the native behaviour in Discourse.
That’s the short story.
Now here’s the long (really long) version of this:
A bit more details about Latest / Top.
To make this easier to follow let’s use Theme creator as an example.
You visit theme creator and you get this:
The nav menu has 3 items, Latest, Top and Categories. Notice the highlight is on Latest.
The paths for those items are:
/latest
/top
/categories
So far so good, now let’s go into the Movies category:
Now you see the category dropdown indicates that the current category is Movies and that highlight is on Latest. But there’a very big difference here.
These “Latest” and “Top” nav links are not the same from before. They are relative to the current category. Here’s what the paths look like:
/c/movies/l/latest
/c/movies/l/top
This means that clicking Latest while in the Movies category shows you the latest in it and not on the top-level like /latest does
So why do I need to know any of this?
Well, let’s continue with theme creator. Let’s say I install this component and add a Movies link to the top navigation like so - notice the highlight is on the top level Latest or ( /latest )
Clicking this link takes you to /c/movies
So the category dropdown shows we’re on Movies and the new nav link is highlighted indicating that we’re on Movies.
So what happens if you click on latest now? This:
The category drop-down points to Movies, highlight points to latest and the Movies nav link is not highlighted This is the type of thing that will make Steve Krug think, which I hear he doesn’t like to do too much 
The actual path is /c/movies/l/latest which means latest in movies. The same applies with Top.
So, now that you’ve read through all of that, you’re in a good position to make a judgement based on your needs.
Do you need the per-category filters of Top and Latest in the top nav? Or will top-level Latest and Top (/latest & /top) and using these be enough for your community?
So let’s say you’re OK with removing per-category filters from the navigation menu, what then?
Enter Minimal mode!
I’ve added two new settings in this version:
Hide dropdowns will hide these two:
And Hide default links will hide the default Latest and Categories links from the nav menu
I’ve kept those two separate because you might want to hide one but keep the other option visible.
So, let’s see what everything looks like with both on, but before we do that,
you have to change one of your site settings top_menu to look like this (same order!):
New and Unread are 100% optional, but Latest has to be #1 and Categories #2 for this to work right.
Here’s the result:
I don’t know about you but that looks too minimal to me
Now we have to create our own navigation. The placeholder or default for the links setting looks like this:
Latest;topics with recent posts;/latest
Categories;all topics grouped by category;/categories
Top;the most active topics in the last year, month, week or day;/top
This is enough to restore those three. You can then add more links.
Let’s go back to the theme creator example:
Let’s say I leave the three “default” values from above and I add two more links. One for the Movies category and one for the Art tag.
Here’s what that would look like:
The path is /latest and shows top-level latest posts.
Now let’s click on the Movies category:
So far so good, we’re on /c/movies and the the nav link for Movies is highlighted.
Now here’s where things change.
Clicking either Latest or Top now will take you to the top-level Latest and Top pages
So you end up going to /latest instead of /c/movies/l/latest and the same for Top.
The same thing happens with tag link “Art” that we added:
This is a lot less confusing and like I mentioned you can still use these filters inside categories / tags :
And if you prefer to keep the dropdowns if you have a large number of categories and tags, there’s no harm in that as well. Just disable the hide_dropdowns setting and things will look like this:
Clicking Latest above will still take you to top-level /latest just like the previous example.
That’s all. You’re now ready to make an informed decision based on your needs.
Update the theme and hack away!
Please let me know if anything is not clear enough.
Thank you so much!
