Viralogy

Extension: Exploded Menu
Score: 2 out of 5
Quick Review: Helps format your menus, but you need to pay to get full functionality.

Picture yourself in this situation. You just installed the Magento Platform and you played around with the administrative panel. Hey you got some products on your page and it’s beginning to look like you might have this e-commerce thing down. So, what’s next you ask? Well how are you going to make your site, your site? We’re talking about that little something special, a secret sauce that will not only make a good first impression on your customers, but also make your site memorable.

The Magento platform has an entire community backing the development of extensions to its platform that they’ve dubbed Magento Connect. While extensions won’t make your site pretty, they offer you a lot in terms of customizing  and enhancing what the platform provides to cater to the needs of your customer. Remember that it’s all about the customer.

This first Magento Extension Review will cover the Exploded Menu extension. Here is the extension key for reference: magento-community/Raptor_ExplodedMenu.

To install an extension: simply login to your admin panel, select System -> Magento Connect -> Magento Connect Manager. Plug in the appropriate extension key and then click “Install”.

Full Review

Exploded Menu is essentially a free version of Raptor Commerce’s SuperMenu, but without certain features and without official support. There’s not much information on the extension page of Exploded Menu besides a short description: “Replaces the standard single column drop down with a multi-column drop-down featuring 2nd and 3rd level menu items.” In case that description was a little bit confusing for you, the extension offers two features over the typical drop-down menu:

1. It organize all levels of menu items in a single drop down (this will be illustrated later)
2. It offers the ability to create multiple columns in the drop down

After playing around with the extension, we’re disappointed to say that the multiple columns feature is not supported in Exploded Menu and is only offered in the full fledged Super Menu product. The only real benefit of Exploded Menu is the multi-level drop down!

Now it’s time to walk through the grand gallery of screenshots! To begin playing with drop-down menus all you have to do is add some categories through your admin panel. Select the “Catalog” tab and click “Manage Categories”:

You can then proceed to add categories and subcategories that eventually show up on your menu. Note that selecting a category and click “Add Subcategory” will add another level of category below the current category. In our experience, we’ve managed to add 6 levels of subcategories beneath root. The assumption is that there is no end to the depth of subcategories you can add although you might want to think about customer experience if you’re adding more than 2 or 3 levels. Playing “how much patience do you have hovering over all these tabs” with your customers might not make you their favorite site.

Here is what our categories look like:

Before and After

Now here’s what the menu looks like on our test page before installing Exploded Menu:

Before

After installing the Exploded Menu extension, it does clean up the formatting of the menu quite nicely given that you have multiple levels of subcategories.

After

Conclusion

The Exploded Menu up does clean up the menu quite nicely, but suffers from a case of bad advertisement. Why surprise users with limited access to the features after they’ve gone through the trouble of installing it? If you’re up front and honest you may get better word-of-mouth advertisement. That being said if you want all the features, you could fork up $75 for the full version of Exploded Menu, Super Menu or even try a free trial. Exploded Menu is fun to play around, but we don’t recommend building it into your production site because of the lack of real support.