Site-wide Navigation with Select Menu

When one is already using jQuery, easiest way is to use Ben Alman's great hashchange plugin to get a select-menu to display the right option when using a select-menu for site-wide navigation (maybe for small screens), for otherwise, with each page refresh, the select will always jump to the top option when there is no selected attribute with a value of selected set for the corresponding page on that corresponding option. This is how I would do it, probably could me less verbose, but it works:

  • set an id on all the individual option items, something like <option id="sm-home"> for the homepage <option id="sm-blog"> for the blog-page, and so on
  • for the next bit to work, we will have to add the page#target (to the id) to the end of the url of the hrefs option values, like so blog/index.html#sm-blog, or maybe blog/index.php#sm-blog

<select name="menu-items" onchange="location = this.options[this.selectedIndex].value;" id="menu-select-menu" class="select-menu">
  <option id="sm-menu" value="">Menu</option>
  <option id="sm-home" value="//mydomain.com/index.html#sm-home">Home</option>
  <option id="sm-blog" value="//mydomain.com/blog/index.html#sm-blog">Blog</option>
  • Bind an event to window.onhashchange (with the help of the plugin) that, when the hash changes, sets a class on the body with the same name as the #hash-tag
  • target the option which has the same/corresponding id as the class set on the body, setting the "selected" attribute as-appropriate.

$(function(){

  // Bind an event to window.onhashchange that, when the hash changes, sets the
  // class on the body with the same name as the #hash-tag
  $(window).hashchange( function(){
    var hash = location.hash;

    // add an class on the body with the same name as the #hash-tag
    $('body').addClass(' ' + ( hash.replace( /^#/, '' ) || 'blank' ));

    // target the option which has the same/corresponding id as the class set on the body, setting the "selected" attribute as-appropriate.
    $('.sm-home #sm-home').attr('selected',true).siblings('option').removeAttr('selected');
    $('.sm-blog #sm-blog').attr('selected',true).siblings('option').removeAttr('selected');
  })

  // Since the event is only triggered when the hash changes, we need to trigger
  // the event now, to handle the hash the page may have loaded with.
  $(window).hashchange();

});

Simplifying

Maybe one is overcomplicating things a bit when doing it like above, because if it is possible to set a class on the pages’ body-tags, and give the select option’s id’s like so:


<option id="sm-blog" value="//mydomain.com/blog">Blog</option>

Then in that case you don't need the hashchange plugin after all, for you can target those options on the corresponding pages like this:


$(function(){
  $('.home-page #sm-home').attr('selected',true).siblings('option').removeAttr('selected');
  $('.blog-page #sm-blog').attr('selected',true).siblings('option').removeAttr('selected');
    .....
});

When on WordPress, one should really use the classes that are set by WordPress on the different body-tags. (one can check for this in Devtools/Firebug) ...

For example a blogroll-page can have this page-id-882 class set on the body-tag, so with jQuery javascript you can set the selected attribute on the option id="sm-blog" like this:


$(function(){
  $('.page-id-882 #sm-blog').attr('selected',true).siblings('option').removeAttr('selected');
});

Fix for iOS

This doesn't seem to work on iOS, at least on my iPad it will always show the most top option, even if there is a selected attribute set. To make this work in our advantage I tried the following: leave the top option (, where it used to say "Menu",) empty, and also give that one an id :


<option id="sm-top" value="#!"></option>

Now we can insert some text in this option with javascript, using the same classes on the body-tags we set earlier, with jQuery's .prepend method for "inside DOM Insertion":


  $('.home-page #sm-top').prepend('Home');
  $('.blog-page #sm-top').prepend('Blog');

Now also on iOS, we have our current page right in the top of the select-menu. On desktop it still goes to the option with the selected attribute, so having this extra option on top there may be redundant, but it wouldn't bother me that much.

P.S. This doesn't seem to work on iOS, at least on my iPad it always shows the most top option ... but there are all kinds of issues with select-menus on iOS, so well ... Fixed, see above.

Examples

This article was also published on Codepen