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Harshit Prasad

Software Engineer - @blinkit, all about search systems - data and infrastructure stuff. Loves to talk about distributed systems and open source.

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Sharing learnings of refactoring dropdown menus in Susper.

This blog was originally posted on FOSSASIA Blog.

The first version of the Susper top menu was providing links to resources and tutorials. In the next version of the menu, we were looking for a menu with more colorful icons, a cleaner UI design and a menu that should appear on the homepage as well. In this blog, I will discuss about refactoring the dropdown menu. This is how earlier dropdown of Susper looks like:

dropdown_1

We decided to create a separate component for the menu DropdownComponent.

At first, I created a drop down menu with matching dimensions similar to what Google follows. Then, I gave padding: 28px to create similar UI to market leader. This will make a dropdown menu with clean UI design. I replaced the old icons with colorful icons. In the dropdown we have:

Added more projects of FOSSASIA like eventyay, loklak, susi and main website of FOSSASIA.

dropdown_2

The main problem I faced was aligning the content inside the dropdown and they should not get disturbed when the screen size changes.

I kept the each icon dimensions as 48 x 48 inside drop down menu. I also arranged them in a row. It was easy to use div element to create rows rather than using ul and li tags which were implemented earlier.

To create a horizontal grey line effect, I used the hr element. I made sure, padding remained the same above and below the horizontal line.

dropdown_3

This is how I worked on refactoring dropdown menu and added it on the homepage as well.

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