What I Know About La La Land Menu
I've run into this term enough times over the years to have some opinions, but I need to be upfront about something first. La La Land Menu isn't one of those widely documented tools or systems with clear documentation. What I can tell you is based on what I've seen in forums, GitHub repos, and a few blog posts that pop up occasionally. I worked with a project that referenced La La Land Menu back in 2023. My team was building a static site generator pipeline and we came across a reference to it as a component system for handling dynamic navigation items in Eleventy-based builds. That's about as specific as I can get without guessing.
La La Land Menu
From what I gathered, the general idea was a lightweight navigation menu component that let you define menu structures in YAML or JSON and render them with minimal JavaScript overhead. The appeal was simplicity. You'd write a config file, drop it into your build, and get a semantic
The one edge case that bit me: if your URLs aren't relative to the site root, the menu items would render broken links unless you preprocessed them. I ran into this when deploying a subdirectory version of the site for staging. The fix was straightforward — I wrote a small Nunjucks filter that prepended the base URL before rendering. Took about twenty minutes to implement and saved me from debugging link issues across three different pages.
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The Realistic View
Is it still actively maintained? I'm not certain. The last commit I could find on the main repo was over two years ago. The concept itself is sound, but the ecosystem around it dried up. If you're looking to use something like this today, you have options. For one, you could fork what exists and maintain it yourself if the feature set matches your needs. It's not a huge codebase. The core rendering logic is probably under 200 lines of JavaScript. Another route is building something similar from scratch using modern frameworks. A plain React or Vue component doing the same thing would take me about an afternoon. The main limitation I'd flag is that this approach doesn't handle internationalization well out of the box. If your project serves multiple languages, you're going to need to extend the data structure and the renderer. That's not a dealbreaker, but it's something to plan for early rather than discovering after you've already localized six pages.
I also noticed that the original implementation didn't account for menu items that need dynamic content — things like user-specific nav bars or A/B tested navigation. If your use case includes that, you'll want to look at a more flexible solution or add that capability yourself. My recommendation depends on what you're actually building. If it's a small project with a static menu that changes infrequently, the existing La La Land Menu approach is fine. Set it up, configure your items, move on. If you need dynamic behavior or i18n support, consider whether maintaining a legacy component is worth the effort compared to writing a fresh implementation tailored to your requirements. The download or repo links circulate on GitHub under a few different names depending on which fork you find. I'd suggest searching for the original author's account rather than relying on mirror repos, since some of the forks have diverged significantly from the source code. Check the issues tab too — if there are open bugs you'd encounter, they'll be documented there.
I've spent enough time with this kind of thing to know that these community-maintained components tend to work well until they don't. The trick is knowing when to invest in maintaining them and when to move on. For La La Land Menu specifically, I'd lean toward moving on unless your needs are very basic.
