Liferay- Drop down Menu Portlet

Here is my Next portlet. Hope you enjoyed the Liferay theme with multilevel dropdown menu. What if you can put that drop down menu as a portlet? Here is what I did for that.

1. Here let’s start by downloading the required files. [dropdown_menu portlet.zip]

2. Put these files in webapps\ROOT\html\portlet\ext\dropdown_menu\

3. Copy the following code to webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\portlet-ext.xml under <portlet-app> tag

<portlet>
<portlet-name>dropdown_menu</portlet-name>
 <display-name>Dropdown Menu</display-name>
<portlet-class>com.liferay.util.bridges.jsp.JSPPortlet</portlet-class>
 <init-param>
 <name>view-jsp</name>
 <value>/html/portlet/ext/dropdown_menu/view.jsp</value>
 </init-param>
 <expiration-cache>0</expiration-cache>
 <supports>
 <mime-type>text/html</mime-type>
 </supports>
 <resource-bundle>com.liferay.portlet.StrutsResourceBundle</resource-bundle>
 <security-role-ref>
 <role-name>guest</role-name>
 </security-role-ref>
 <security-role-ref>
 <role-name>power-user</role-name>
 </security-role-ref>
 <security-role-ref>
 <role-name>user</role-name>
 </security-role-ref>
 </portlet>

4. Copy the following code to webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\liferay-portlet-ext.xml under <portlets> tag

<portlet>
<portlet-name>dropdown_menu</portlet-name>
 <configuration-action-class>com.liferay.portlet.sitemap.action.ConfigurationActionImpl</configuration-action-class>
<portlet-data-handler-class>com.liferay.portlet.sitemap.lar.SitemapPortletDataHandlerImpl</portlet-data-handler-class>
 <use-default-template>true</use-default-template>
 <restore-current-view>false</restore-current-view>
 <layout-cacheable>true</layout-cacheable>
 <instanceable>true</instanceable>
<private-request-attributes>false</private-request-attributes>
<private-session-attributes>false</private-session-attributes>
 <render-weight>50</render-weight>
 <header-portlet-css>/html/portlet/ext/dropdown_menu/css.jsp</header-portlet-css>
 <css-class-wrapper>portlet-site-map</css-class-wrapper>
 <add-default-resource>true</add-default-resource>
 </portlet>

5.  Also make an entry in webapps\ROOT\WEB-INF\liferay-display.xml under <category name=”category.cms”>> as follows

 <display>
 <category name="category.cms">
 ......
<portlet id="dropdown_menu" />
 </category>
 .......
 </display>

You can even customize the root folder for the  drop down menu.

Have you seen the dynamic sitemap portlet? This is a modification of that one. I applied CSS to display the sitemap portlet as a drop down menu. It works pretty well in Firefox and Ie.