Sneak preview: I’ve started working on another new PHP-based HTML and AJAX rendering class, called awfRadial. Click the thumbnails for a bigger storyboard image of rendering concepts.

The premise is simple: display between 1 and 48 rendered “objects” in radial form around a central element, each object having user configurable HTML, CSS, and AJAX properties for complete customization. This will be generic so that it can be implemented in many ways; I’ll probably release several additional wrapper classes for some common implementations such as radial context menu, or data drill-through applications.

Having read-up some on other attempts to create browser-happy radial menus, I’m assuming this will be a fairly daunting project, as most people have moved on to Flash or Java applets to make it work. I aim to make the end result as extensible as possible, but I always take the “crawl, walk, run” approach with new projects. So the first version will likely be rendered as a flat HTML table emulating a circular layout. To do this with raw CSS positioning will have to wait for a later release. The cross-browser issues relating to DIV positioning are my pet peeve and I want to at least get proof of concept functional before banging my head against IE6.

Tags: awfRadial, class, CSS, menu, PHP

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