2.8.0.rst

Wagtailmenus 2.8 release notes

What's new?

Smarter 'active class' attribution for menu items that link to custom URLs

By default, menu items linking to custom URLs are currently only attributed with the 'active' class if their link_url value matches the path of the current request exactly, producing unexpected results when GET parameters or fragments are added to the end of a link_url value.

A new and improved approach to active class attribution for custom URL links has now been implemented (by Joshua C. Jackson and Andy Babic), which you can enable by adding WAGTAILMENUS_CUSTOM_URL_SMART_ACTIVE_CLASSES = True to your project's settings.

With the new approach, only the 'path' part of the link_url value is used for comparison with request.path, which produces far more consistent results. The new approach also allows the 'ancestor' class to be attributed to menu items where the link_url looks like an ancestor of the current request URL. For example, if a menu item's link_url value is '/news/', and the request path is '/news/boring-news-article/', then the menu item will be attributed with the 'ancestor' class.

The previous behaviour is now deprecated in favour of this new approach, and will be removed in version 2.10, with the new approach becoming the default (and only) option.

Minor changes & bug fixes

• Various documentation spelling/formatting corrections (thanks to Sergey Fedoseev and Pierre Manceaux).

Deprecations

• The current 'active class' attribution behaviour for menu items linking to custom URLs is deprecated (see above for details). Add WAGTAILMENUS_CUSTOM_URL_SMART_ACTIVE_CLASSES = True to your project's settings to enable the new and improved behaviour and silence the deprecation warning.

Upgrade considerations

Following the standard deprecation period, the following classes, methods and behaviour have been removed:

• Wagtailmenus now unconditionally uses backend-specific templates for rendering, and the WAGTAILMENUS_USE_BACKEND_SPECIFIC_TEMPLATES setting is ignored completely. See the 2.6 release notes for more info: http://wagtailmenus.readthedocs.io/en/stable/releases/2.6.0.html#improved-compatibility-with-alternative-template-backends.
• The get_template_engine() method has been removed from wagtailmenus.models.menus.Menu.
• The panels attribute has been removed from the AbstractMainMenu and AbstractFlatMenu models, as have the main_menu_panels and flat_menu_panels panel definition values from wagtailmenus.panels.