Dear Madam / Sir,

when I set up an Atahualpa Category menu it works fine on first glance.
But looking closer I found irritating things:

1) I have no control of the appearance of the active menu item.
(Yes I know, in some threads in this forum CSS-Code is shown,
but the active-method never works, neither for links nor for lists.)

2) I found no way to make the top category - lets call it "car" - to be
inert. That means if "car" has the sub menus "motor" and "color",
(and therefore the category "car" has the sub categories "motor"
and "color") I don't want to see all the posts in the category "car"
(there are none, only in the sub categories). So if I click on the
menu item "car" nothing should happen, but alas, it does: all the
post from the sub categories appear. What am I doing wrong?

3) Related to the problem above: How can I suppress the appearance
of all the posts from all of the sub categories if I click on the menu
item of the parent category (which in itself contains no posts)?

I'm using WordPress 3.1, Atahualpa 3.6.4 and as only Plugin "Blogroll
to Page" 1.0.0, PHP 5.3.5 and MySQL 5.5.9.

I would greatly appreciate your help,
Georg Huber

Are you using the automatic Atahualpa category menu or a custom WprdPress menu?
What are your settings on the 'Category Menu Bar'?
Have you got any settings in the 'CSS Inserts' option?
What happens if you remove them?
What is the url?
how many posts have more than one category tied to them?
What do you mean 'active-method never works, neither for links nor for lists' - please point to an example

This is taken from the WordPress Codex http://codex.wordpress.org/Posts_Categories_SubPanel

Parent
Use this drop-down if you want to make this Category a sub-Category; you will select the sub-Category's Parent here. For example, you may have a Category called "Photos" but want to add further clarification about the subject of a particular "Photos" post. You could add "Oregon Coast" and "Ice Storm" as sub-Categories to the "Photos" Category; "Photos" would be the Parent of these two new sub-Categories.
Sub-Categories show up on your blog's page just like Categories, except they will typically be nested under their Parent Categories. When someone visits your site and clicks the "Photos" Category link, all posts in "Photos" and all its sub-Categories will be displayed. Clicking the "Oregon Coast" Category link only displays those post in that sub-Category. If you assign a post to a sub-Category (e.g. "Oregon Coast"), you can choose to assign that post to the sub-Category's parent ("Photos") or not. Either way, all "Oregon Coast" posts will show up in the "Photos" Category page. The only difference is that the list of Categories of which a particular post is actually a member. In the WordPress Default 1.6 Theme (Kubrick), this list is shown below the text of each post.

Dear Mr juggledad,

thank you for (i) answering at all and (ii) so quickly. It's a heartening
experience to find people trying to help one. So thank you again.

In your first answer (06:39 PM) you stated some questions.
Here are my answers:

Q.1. Are you using the automatic Atahualpa category menu or a custom WprdPress menu?

I'm using the automatic Atahualpa category menu.


Q.2. What are your settings on the 'Category Menu Bar'?

Animate Category Menu Bar no
Home link in Category Menu Bar blank
Exclude categories from Category Menu Bar? blank
Depth of Category Menu Bar 0
Sort Category Menu Bar by: name
Sorting order Category Menu Bar ASC
Title tags in Category Menu Bar No
Add category description to menu bar tabs No
Default Category description text View all posts filed under<br />%category%
Border around all menu items solid 1px #00008F
Background color 00008F
Background color: Hover CC0000
Background color: Parent 008F8F
Font for Category Menu Bar 13px Tahoma, Arial, sans-serif
Link Color FFFFFF
Link Color: Hover FFFF10
Transform text in Category Menu Bar? capitalize
White or Black Arrows as Sub Menu Indicator? white
Width of Sub Menus 11


Q.3. Have you got any settings in the 'CSS Inserts' option?

Yes, quite a lot. These code stems from this Forum, mostly authored by yourself.


Q.4. What happens if you remove them?

Leaving aside the changings to be expected (fonts, colors, spacings, etc) the
behavior of the menu items remains as before.


Q.5. What is the url?

There is no url right now, because I'm running it on my PC on a local server.
The Software I use is called "The Uniform Server". I'm using WordPress 3.1,
Atahualpa 3.6.4 and as only Plugin "Blogroll to Page" 1.0.0, PHP 5.3.5
and MySQL 5.5.9.


Q.6. how many posts have more than one category tied to them?

Just one, this being a test setup. The top category is called Physics and has
a child category called "Optics". This child "Optics" in turn has a child category
called "Nonlinear Optics". "Physics" contains - besides the child categories -
no posts. "Optics" contains - besides the child category - two posts.
"Nonlinear Optics" contains two posts.


Q.7. What do you mean 'active-method never works, neither for links nor for lists' - please point
to an example

Thats the hard part. The best would be to point to my blog under construction,
which I can't do see Q.5. (url).

You, Mr juggledad, have run across this topic really often, because most of the
answers where handed out by yourself in this forum.

I Know your rule "love, hate" an tried to keep the order and experimented with
different orders. Here's your code from http://forum.bytesforall.com/showthread.php?t=7045,
also called "Juggledad's colored menu cheat sheet ":
ul.rMenu li a:link,
ul.rMenu li a:hover,
ul.rMenu li a:active,
ul.rMenu li a:visited
"link", "hover" and "visited" work fine. "active" never did, no matter what I tried.

http://forum.bytesforall.com/showthread.php?t=12746
http://forum.bytesforall.com/showthread.php?t=7045


II. In your second reply you sent me an excerpt from the WordPress Codex
(http:// codex.wordpress.org/Posts_Categories_SubPanel).

OK. This means that behavior is intentionally this way. But isn't there a work around?
I mean without resorting to PHP, solely based on CSS?

How did the Suffusion-Crew manage it: at http://www.aquoid.com/news/themes/suffusion/
you find two top menus:

Menu1: Announcements Themes Plugins Tutorials Bragging Rights Showcase Contact

Menu2: General Plugin Releases Recipes Theme Releases Translations Support Forum

The first menu is an example for the behavior I want for the category menu. How did they
achieve this? (It works without JavaScript, for I disabled it. [I'm using Opera 11.00].)
(By the way: I can imitate the looks of their menus [I found that in the Atahualpa forums],
but not their functioning.)


I will try to setup my blog also in Suffusion and see how they do things, but on the whole I would
rather stay with Atahualpa.


It would be very kind if you could reply to my statements above,
thanking you in advance and expressing heartfelt regards,
Georg Huber

please go to ato->Export/Import settings and export your settings and attach them as a reply

Dear Mr juggledad,

attached are the latest two settings-files:
________________________________________

ata-localhost-20110316-04.txt

is the one before I wrote my first plea for help.

_______________________________________

ata-localhost-20110317-01.txt

is a later one (with some experimental CSS to
address the problem at hand). It might show
some other subtle changes because in between
these two settings I changed themes to
Suffusion and back again to Atahualpa.

________________________________________


The comments in the CSS-insert part are in my
native language German.


Thank you very much,

Georg Huber

ata-localhost-20110317-01.txt

ata-localhost-20110316-04.txt

When you start playing with the menu CSS you have to really look at it. There are over 400 lines of CSS that apply to the menus. When you click on one of the Category menus the CSS that is appies is

div#menu2 ul.rMenu li.current-menu-item a:link, 
div#menu2 ul.rMenu li.current-menu-item a:active, 
div#menu2 ul.rMenu li.current-menu-item a:hover, 
div#menu2 ul.rMenu li.current-menu-item a:visited, 
div#menu2 ul.rMenu li.current-cat a:link, 
div#menu2 ul.rMenu li.current-cat a:active, 
div#menu2 ul.rMenu li.current-cat a:hover, 
div#menu2 ul.rMenu li.current-cat a:visited, 
div#menu2 ul.rMenu li a:hover {
    background-color: #CC0000;
    color: #FFFF10;
}

If you want the active category to be something different, you have to override this CSS using the CSS Selector 'div#menu2 ul.rMenu li.current-cat a:active'. If you just put in 'div#menu2 ul.rMenu li a:active' it would not take effect because the original CSS Selector was more specific (the more specific the Selector the higher precedence it has)

Hope this helps you to understand what is going on.

Dear Mr juggledad,

you are very quick to respond. Thanks again.

But all your kind efforts were to no avail.

Your CSS-code only works (that is "active" shows a response) if I use the menus from WordPress (without any further changes to my CSS-insert!)

Of course your CSS-code works if I remove all of my CSS-inserts and just use yours: WordPress menus work with respect to "active", but not the Atahualpa-menus.

I really lost heart and try my luck with Suffusion. I was afraid that this outcome would be unavoidable because in the threads of this forum concerning the "active"-problem no one of the petitioners left a notice saying that anything suggested here has helped.

It really seems to be a problematic issue not easily resolved.

So now I have two options: give up all the work with my Atahualpa styling and start anew in Suffusion or try to live with the "active"-problem.

If the problem showed up in some minor styling, say some borders, I wouldn't mind, but it shows up in a menu bar visible throughout all of my hopefully soon-to-be blog.

That's why I now have to switch to Suffusion - without
rancor (even though I lost about a week's worth of work)
but with a feeling of loss.

By the way: this is exactly the situation which makes me shrink back from paid themes: Now "only" the work of a week is lost not money as well.

But thank you again for all your efforts and your kindness.

Best regards,
Georg Huber

PS: Maybe in a future version of Atahualpa this problem will have been solved. Then I switch back to Atahualpa! So let's hope this happens soon. Best would be tomorrow!