Page refreshes if submenu on toggle menu is open

New information: I figured out why your demo doesn’t do it – you apparently don’t have a page associated with the “parent” menu item of the submenu, but I do. I just now realized that it is not simply refreshing the same page – it is going to the parent link. So whatever code opens the submenu on a single tap needs to stop the event from triggering the action that would happen if a mouse clicked on the parent. I assume the desired behavior would be that a double-tap, long-press, or some other different touch action would trigger going to the parent page, right? I don’t own a smartphone myself, and do very little web browsing on my tablet, so I don’t really know what the customary tap actions and behaviors are for this situation.

Yes, of course the behavior would be different, as tapping is impossible with a mouse, and clicking is impossible with a finger. All the descriptions of the problem were from testing on the mobile devices I mentioned – a smartphone of unknown type, a Galaxy S5 using the default Android browser, and an Acer Iconia Tab A100 7″ Android tablet. The issue is with tapping, i.e. the use of a touchscreen. In those cases there is no such thing as hover, so the only way that a user can open the submenu is by tapping the parent item.

The only thing I did with my desktop browser was use it to confirm that your demo site had no link on the parent (I clicked and nothing happened). If your theme will not support a link on the parent item, you will need to make that very clear in your v. 2.5 documentation.

I’m not sure what you mean by “both scenarios”. You added a link to the parent menu item of the submenu, and then on a touchscreen device were able to tap on the parent item to open the submenu, and the site didn’t go to the parent item’s link a couple seconds after opening the submenu? Is that on a demo site somewhere that I can try myself?

We’ve tried both tapping a parent element that has no link set (or just a #) and one that actually links to a page…
…Unfortunately, this appears to be a problem at the device level. iPhone and iPad work fine.

Before we assume it’s an Android vs. iOS thing, did you try my site? http://thinkword.com
I found an old WP forum thread where iOS users were having my problem with the TwentyThirteen theme. It was supposedly fixed, so I tested with my Android tablet. The demo they cited (on WP.com) does work, but my site running TwentyThirteen does not. Either WP.com added a hack to their copy of the theme that is not in the WP.org release, or there is something hinky with my site.

If my site fails on your devices, can you share a link to a site of yours that works, so I can try it with devices I have access to?

We’re unable to find any resources on Galaxy tapping, why it would work differently from other popular devices or how to adjust those settings.

It wasn’t just my husband’s Galaxy; my Acer tablet does it, as does a friend’s Fujitsu smartphone.

One popular option that many use for their mobile menu is to simply hide sub-menus…

Why would hiding submenus be a solution? That would mean no access to the submenu items at all for anyone using a mobile device. The TwentyFourteen theme goes the opposite direction, making the entire menu “flat” (everything open, just indents for sub-items) when in toggle-menu mode. The designers of that theme apparently felt it was too hard to make open/closing submenus work without Javascript, or maybe flat menus are the new style this year…

You closed this topic, but I think that is premature. I would have talked to you privately about this, but there is no way to contact you except the forum. (You’re welcome to get my email address from your forum registrations and write to me offline if you prefer.)

Although your final post on that thread seemed to indicate that you thought I was asking for a redesign, if you read the first two paragraphs of my final post on that thread, you’ll see that all I specifically asked for was one more minute of help with troubleshooting (the rest of the post was clarification and additional information that I had learned by internet research and experimentation with the themes that come with WP). All I know so far about the issue at hand is that the menu works on some undisclosed testbed on iPhone and iPad (your demo site has two submenus, but neither parent has a page link), but it doesn’t work on my site with three different brands of Android devices. So I asked you to please do one of the following (both would be even better):

• Try my site on your iPhone
• Give me a link to the site that worked for you, so that I can try it with these Android devices

Even if it weren’t “unique, original and experimental” new code (using your own words), I don’t think that’s too much to ask from the support department of a business I paid money to.

Currently, worldwide market share reports state that Android has about 80% of mobile sales and growing steadily, while iOS is dropping. In the U.S. it is less so, but Android is still over 60%. In May, the Samsung Galaxy S5 was the second-best selling smartphone in the U.S., and Samsung as a single brand sells more than Apple, with 37% of sales over the most recent 3-month reporting period. (Source: http://news.yahoo.com/despite-iphone-6-hype-android-continues-dominate-ios-175728413.html, http://www.businessinsider.com/iphone-v-android-market-share-2014-5, etc.) Apple has been proudly claiming that despite much lower sales their devices are still used more on the web, but very soon that will no longer be true either. (Source: http://bgr.com/2014/07/01/android-market-share-q2-2014/)

Given that reality, I would think that supporting Android would be at least as important as iOS, or even more so. However, as I have said in https://startupwp.com/topic/toggle-menu-with-submenus/ and https://startupwp.com/topic/page-refreshes-if-submenu-on-toggle-menu-is-open/, I have tried to use three different Android devices:

• Samsung Galaxy S5 (the top-selling Android cell phone by far)
• Fujitsu ARROWS cell phone (an example of a different brand)
• Acer Iconia Tab A100 (7″ Android tablet)

All of them behave exactly the same way with the new toggle menu on StartupPro 2.5. If a menu item has both a page link (or custom link – anything except just “#”) and a submenu, you cannot use the submenu on any Android device I have tested.

You keep closing my threads because you say that it works on “the most popular devices”. Really? Are those only Apple devices, or do you plan to support Android, too? Have you tested it with the Android browser at all? (If so, you have not mentioned it so far – you have only talked about iPhone and iPad.) My 3-out-of-3 observations would lead me to believe that this is not about individual models of devices, but about the fundamental behavior of Android’s standard browser – it sends a “click” event when the parent of the submenu is tapped, which your theme does not cancel, so the page is refreshed with the parent link. I totally agree with you that a simple CSS-only implementation would be cool, but it may not be possible – many other developers have tried to find simple solutions but in the end found it necessary to use Javascript to cancel the click event.

Sorry about the multiple topics – I only did that because twice you closed the topic so that I could not respond. Thank you for combining them, and especially for leaving it open this time.

I’m not looking for something more advanced. When you added a toggle menu to version 2.5, its design is such that it is clearly intended to include submenu capability. In the Beta Testing thread you even said you were working on fixes to it, e.g. the width of the submenu and the line spacing. (I’m looking forward to that updated version – I tried fixing that in my child theme but failed to get the right combination of CSS rules.) Meanwhile, even though you gave up on the Beta Testing phase (I don’t blame you a bit – one tester is not enough to have a whole phase!), you invited customers to report bugs in the Bugs forum. So I did. It took me a while to figure out exactly what was happening (my first description was inaccurate – the menu is not folding up, per se), but I kept you informed of my findings. Then you started saying that this issue was specific to a single device that might have an unusual setting or something, and closed my topic (twice) before I had a chance to clear up what seemed to be a misunderstanding. You seemed convinced that the submenu works (even with a parent link) on enough devices that you can claim it as a feature of your theme without further development. That’s the point I have issue with. I tried to help with testing, but my testing results were not treated as valid. If you go ahead and admit that it doesn’t support having a link on the parent item (and I recommend that you put that in your documentation so that you get fewer support contacts from others in the future), that’s fine. I would have changed my menu to avoid parent links (or studied how to make it work and edited the child theme), and we would have been done talking. But you didn’t do that, so I thought you still intended for even that combination of content to work okay. That’s why I kept writing back – I’m not trying to be difficult; I’m trying to help by providing Android testing and feedback, since you apparently only have Apple devices.

Okay, I’ll drop the subject. Two short final questions:

1. Are you still planning on widening the submenu, as you said on the Beta Feedback thread that you would do?
2. Since what I installed was the Beta, will it still alert me when updates come out, or do I need to reinstall the released 2.5 and set my settings again?