Following my initial comments on MbD’s post “Also for TA: Drop down menu in navigation bar” (comment here) and as an example of an overflow box menu, I’ve created a test menu using our member feeds, sitting right below the “regular” member feeds menu I created yesterday.

This is to show how we could use such a box as a menu (e.g., for members’ “About Me” pages or Halloween Bingo / Festive Tasks master update posts), if we wanted to provide links to those member posts / pages directly from the sidebar (instead of sending site visitors to a separate index page), regardless how many member page links we need to accommodate — AND to the extent we can’t use a drop-down menu: please note MbD’s comments in her original post (bottom line: drop-down menus too far down the sidebar may run into spacing and visibility issues).

I’ve left the pre-formatted “underlined” design of the links forming the menu in place to show that this really is just a simple list of links, stuck inside a box that is smaller than (= not as high as) the height of the actual list (which in turn is what forces the “overflow” mechanism to activate).  Like all other sidebar features, this can be changed.  (Err, at least in theory.  If we can get WP to cooperate.)

The size (height / width) of the box is customizable at will.  On my own blog I typically use heights of 300px or 350px — those would have been too large to show the “overflow” functionality with a list as short as our current number of member feeds, but they might still be the right size(s) for a “Members’ About Me Pages” menu, if we wanted to use an overflow box to link to those.  And as it is only the height of the box itself that we need to worry about in terms of the space this item takes in the sidebar,  there is no limit to the number of lines (links to member pages / master posts) that such a menu can accommodate.

ETA (for MbD):

This is what the overflow menu looks like on my screen.

Maybe it’s dependent on what browsers we use and how they are configured?