Will Dynamic Customisable Main Menu import be updated for v7?

[toricred]

@jaminben That is exactly what I'm after. I guess I'll just have to wait until Ortus is out.

[RetroBox]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

In all honesty, they set up the menus in the v7 UI very well so that it doesn't take much studio knowledge at all to move/adjust the menu's around.

Yes, I do agree that it is in our power to help ourselves with Studio, and this is probably the best approach since we may all want something simple, but slightly different from everyone else.

It really would be awesome for one of our talented developers to document how to make some changes to the menu in a small tutorial. It would be great to have a sections that show:

a. Moving menus around (main menu items like TV and Video and sub-menu items within these).
b. Hiding menu items - there is already a great plugin to hide main menu items, but it would be great to know how to hide sub-menu items.
c. Launching Programs - this would require knowing how to create a new submenu category and how to assign it a command (unless this is too involved).

I can see how these may seem like very simple tasks, but I have launched studio with the default STV and have a hard time understanding how everything is connected. I did go through the examples in the thick Studio manual, and these did not help too much in fulfilling this purpose. Maybe if there is a small guide on doing these 3 items, many peoples issues would become apeaced or go away completely. I know there are requests for far more complicated tasks, but these could possibly be addressed later. If the tutorial is in the form of a Wiki, it would certainly grow with time.

Having a "friendly guide to Studio" that shows how to perform specific tasks that users actually want to deploy may be the best stepping stone for the rest of us to get into development.

[RetroBox]

I decided to put my money where my mouth is and started a first draft of the tutorial by showing how to move menus up and down. It isn't much, but it is a start and may help out someone looking how to do this.

I will be the first to say that my experience in Studio is very, very limited and there may be more elegant ways to accomplish what I just did - particularly using the Plugins port to manage your own customizations to the STV as Fuzzy was suggesting. Perhaps needless to say, but it would also be a smart idea to play around in Studio using a test box...

[saltlyck2]

Originally Posted by RetroBox

Yes, I do agree that it is in our power to help ourselves with Studio, and this is probably the best approach since we may all want something simple, but slightly different from everyone else.

It really would be awesome for one of our talented developers to document how to make some changes to the menu in a small tutorial. It would be great to have a sections that show:

a. Moving menus around (main menu items like TV and Video and sub-menu items within these).
b. Hiding menu items - there is already a great plugin to hide main menu items, but it would be great to know how to hide sub-menu items.
c. Launching Programs - this would require knowing how to create a new submenu category and how to assign it a command (unless this is too involved).

I can see how these may seem like very simple tasks, but I have launched studio with the default STV and have a hard time understanding how everything is connected. I did go through the examples in the thick Studio manual, and these did not help too much in fulfilling this purpose. Maybe if there is a small guide on doing these 3 items, many peoples issues would become apeaced or go away completely. I know there are requests for far more complicated tasks, but these could possibly be addressed later. If the tutorial is in the form of a Wiki, it would certainly grow with time.

Having a "friendly guide to Studio" that shows how to perform specific tasks that users actually want to deploy may be the best stepping stone for the rest of us to get into development.

+1 here. I have no problem giving studio a try. I'd just rather connect the dots the first time. Launching external programs like Gamex and putting sage to sleep (which I've done without for over a month now) would hopefully be my first venture.

I think dynamic menus might not be exactly what I need here. Maybe a "launch external program" menu that only required you to put shortcuts to the program you need in a folder. They can be listed in sage by filename.lnk.

[RetroBox]

I am not sure if this is going to take flight, but I put together a quick Google Site to house this document and hopefully other tutorials in the future. The website is open to everyone, but PM me with an email address if you would like access to add or change documents.

https://sites.google.com/site/sagestudiotutorials/

[cat6man]

i'd actually be quite happy with something much simpler.

there is already a custom menu plugin, that let's me delete
'exit' and 'photos' on my main menu, making it less cluttered.

all i need is the exact same capability at the next level, i.e. let me suppress
unwanted submenu items............so one more level of custom menu on/off would be >90% of what i want in a customizable menu

hopefully, the 2nd level down version is not a lot harder than the top level menu version plugin

my 2 cents..............

[joe123]

Originally Posted by alon24

Yes I do second that

Make that 3! ( and many more yes! ).

I would not switch to V7 unless it has Neilms Dynamic menus (or look a like.

[sdsean]

So i guess ortus is dead. . . I see a lot of people on the forums wanting
customizable menus.

I'm in the same boat, as well as wanting to be able to launch random programs for other types of video viewing or games (ala an arcade plugin like that which used to be in BeyondMedia).

One option I thought of was you could use SageMC to get all of this, but then you lose the pretty new v7 UI. . . seems like there could be some integration there. . .

[Fuzzy]

No offense to mike, but pulling code from SageMC into the v7 UI would not really be all that prudent. I'm pretty sure one reason SageMC was 'abandoned' was that it had just become entirely too bloated. The way the current v7 menus work is completely incompatible with the way the SageMC (and nielm's) dynamic menus worked. Really, the only way to 'port it over' would be to replace the v7 main menu wholesale, and go back to a single menu per screen arrangement - a'la v3/6, and SageMC.

[toricred]

Phoenix is still alive. It might have customizable menus.

[Eckwell]

Using the Sage7 UI has dramatically decreased the WAF. Of course there is a fear of change, but the fact that there are now TOO many options makes it confusing. Without being able to change the menus I am still running the Sage6 Menu on the Sage7 Server.

[samgreco]

Originally Posted by Eckwell

Using the Sage7 UI has dramatically decreased the WAF. Of course there is a fear of change, but the fact that there are now TOO many options makes it confusing. Without being able to change the menus I am still running the Sage6 Menu on the Sage7 Server.

Same here. Although I haven't switched back to SageMC yet, I think I will be doing that soon. I had it setup so that 90% of what we needed on a daily basis could be done from the first menu. Scroll, click. Done. Now it seems that you have to drill down so deep a lot of the time.

[mightyt]

Dynamic Menus has been very popular for many years. One of the most popular along with Comskip. I get why Comskip would not be added, but IMHO it was unwise to think menu customization should not be apart of the product out of the box. Version 7 was the prime opportunity.

Sage, you did some great stuff with the UI ... To me, that rounded off the top three things I mention here and was another desire widely vocalized for years ... Not seeing any posts from Nielm in over a year, our only hope is that someone as capable can port over this plugin. We can only hope ...

[sleonard]

Didn't JPhipps say towards the end of the Ortus thread that many of the plugins that together made up the Ortus STV would get released as individual plugins? Including the customizable menus plugin?

I took his posts to mean that it was just a matter of time.

S

[jphipps]

I heard that same rumor...

I also heard Ortus was dead... It is pretty cool being a Zombie i must say...

[pjpjpjpj]

The Phoenix thread indicates that customizing will be possible. They're not sure yet whether it will come with that capability, but if it doesn't, it will be set up for someone else to write a much simpler plugin using Phoenix's capabilities.

[wayner]

Originally Posted by Fuzzy

No offense to mike, but pulling code from SageMC into the v7 UI would not really be all that prudent. I'm pretty sure one reason SageMC was 'abandoned' was that it had just become entirely too bloated. The way the current v7 menus work is completely incompatible with the way the SageMC (and nielm's) dynamic menus worked. Really, the only way to 'port it over' would be to replace the v7 main menu wholesale, and go back to a single menu per screen arrangement - a'la v3/6, and SageMC.

I have been using SageMC on top of Sage7 from the day I started to let the family use my Sage7 server - that was back in about July/August. SageMC runs fine on top of V7 - of course you can't customize the menus and there are some red vertical lines that inexplicably crop up every now and then. But I still find it a far superior UI framework to the overly detailed menus and screens in the default UI.

Maybe what we need is separate user and administrator menu structures in Sage. That is kind of what I have as I run the default UI on the server, but it is in my "server room" in the basement on a KVM switch with some other PCs.

[alon24]

Anything new with this issue???

I am not moving to sage V7 until I can have my own menu (customizable - to include hebrew in it) and that I can point to different directories, for diffrent menu items (kids - movies, shows, my favorite movies and such)....


I would love to taste v7 but cannot until I have this functionality.

[joe123]

Originally Posted by alon24

Anything new with this issue???

I am not moving to sage V7 until I can have my own menu (customizable - to include hebrew in it) and that I can point to different directories, for diffrent menu items (kids - movies, shows, my favorite movies and such)....
.

I myself want this too although I already move to V7, I find myself really wanting to change the Menu items to say something else.

Not hebrew for me, but Spanglish. Like I want to add a "Juan more Time" menu option

[mightyt]

Originally Posted by alon24

Anything new with this issue???

I am not moving to sage V7 until I can have my own menu (customizable - to include hebrew in it) and that I can point to different directories, for diffrent menu items (kids - movies, shows, my favorite movies and such)....


I would love to taste v7 but cannot until I have this functionality.

Ditto .... Minus the Hebrew ... I'd be happy with English ...

Someone smart ... Please make this happen! PLEASE!!! .