Drop-down menus in SharePoint

Did you know you can add drop-down menu functionality to the top navigation and the quick launch menu? This is a very basic feature of SharePoint, and as I found out it's not common knowledge. It's not new - I used it in MOSS 2007 and it's still there.

This is how it looks in the top navigation:


And this is the quick launch menu:


You only have to set 2 properties in these controls to achieve this. They are located in the master page, so you have to edit it in SharePoint Designer.
This is the quick launch menu control:

<SharePoint:AspMenu
  id="V4QuickLaunchMenu"
  runat="server"
  EnableViewState="false"
  DataSourceId="QuickLaunchSiteMap"
  UseSimpleRendering="true"
  UseSeparateCss="false"
  Orientation="Vertical"
  StaticDisplayLevels="2"
  MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels="0"
  SkipLinkText=""
  CssClass="s4-ql" />

We are interested in 2 properties:

• StaticDisplayLevels - this determines how many levels are seen by default
• MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels - this determines how many levels can be expanded

For example, if you set StaticDisplayLevel to 1 and MaximumDynamicDisplayLevels to 4, you'll see only the top site but when you hover over it you'll get 4 more sub-sites. If your hierarchy goes deeper than 4 sub-sites you won't be able to see the rest.

The same goes for the top navigation menu, but be careful - if you set StaticDisplayLevel to something greater than 2 you'll get sub sites on the same level as the top site.

Please note that the sub-sites have to inherit the navigation from their parent in order for the menus to be consistent across all the sites.

Finally, it is most advised to modify the css so that the menus look appealing. The default design does not look good on them.