customizing menu layout in joomla

Question

Hey everyone. I would like to create a joomla menu but have it display in three columns, like so:

+----------+----------+----------+
| item0    |  item1   | item2    |
| item3    |  item4   | item5    |
|  ...     |  ...     |  ...     |
|          |          |          |

For the life of me I can't think of a way to do it. Granted, I am fairly new at joomla and php, but this has me stumped. Does anyone have any suggestions?

Answer 1

Joomla doesn't come with built-in functionality to create such a drop down menu. However, you might want to have a look at these menu plugins:

http://www.onestopjoomla.com/extensions/menu/

Answer 2

TO anyone who might come across this, I've come up with a hacky solution. Then again, I'm new at this webdev stuff (doing it for ~3 months) so maybe this is typical:

My solution: The menu buttons are to be images, and so I can rely on them being of fixed size. That being said, I specified the width of their containing element, and get them wrapping. As a proof of concept to myself, I've got the following:

<div id="example">
  <jdoc:include type="modules" name="menuposn" />
</div>

where the menu is rendered in menuposn. I then have this css:

div#example{
  width:600px;
  overflow:auto;
}

div#example ul{
  width:600px;
  margin:0;
  padding:0;
  border:0;
}

div#example ul li{
  width:200px;
  float:left;
  margin:0;
  padding:0;
  border:0; 
}

It works!