Make a better way to handle page level redirects, or a nav item that doesn’t have to have an index page of its own (like a section link with a different name).
So Often my users want things to show up in nav widgets and drop down menus, but they don’t have enough content to make a whole different page for one item.
So I build blank nav pages, so they will showup in menu’s and then I end-up putting a little js redirect code on that blank page to send it to the page where the content exists. Like this
Only problem with this is as soon as I add this code to the additional code section of the page, the page won’t finish rendering and it sits there spinning forever. It works when published out. But once I paste that code in I can’t ever open that page again in edit mode in cm1 because it never finishes rendering because of the redirect. So I then have to delete that page and make it again if I want to change anything the future.
Here is my example. I have a program “Animal Welfare & Humane Slaughter”. It has 6 small sub courses that make up that program. In my drop down menus, My conEd coordinator wants to be able to see listed all of the 6 sub courses that make up the program, so users know they have the option to just take 1 or 2 of the sub-courses individually if they choose.
Normally (for my other ConEd courses that use the same template) I just create a nav file structure so each sub-course has its own content page. But in this case each sub-course is so small that it only has 1 small paragraph description for content (not enough to Warrent its own full page). So the Coordinator has put all the sub-course descriptions onto the main program page.
So then I go in and start adding my redirects to send all those sub - nav pages to the main program page where the content exsits all grouped together.
So you may be thinking design your template differently. But trying to keep from building too many different custom templates, so you don’t have a management nightmare, I end up trying to do these redirects and it gets messy.
SOLUTION:
All this could be solved by just changing the section link option to allow you to add in a custom link name, that will appear in the drop down menu. (Still navigate to the page like you do now)
Does that make sense to anyone else? I have run into so many cases where I could use this.
Another example Wording Issues with nav design:
We have 2 campuses so on my main page I need to identify it as Calgary Campus Student Services, and Olds Campus Student Services.
I want to link to the pages that hold the info for both of these sections, on my main Student Services page. These are long names and take up a lot of space on my horizontal nav bar.
I also have a main landing page for Just my Calgary Campus. When you are on that page, it is implied that all the information linking off that page applies to the Calgary Campus.
So I want to use a section link so I can link to the same page of content, but I no longer need to say “Calgary Campus Student Services”. Just the wording “Student Services” will suffice, do to the context of the nav menu. But I don’t have the option to still keep it a section link and have the wording appear one way on one page and another way on another page.
Seems so simple to me to fix this. Not sure if this would have longer reaching negative ramifications? But its something I struggle with constantly in my nav design on a large site. Thought I would share.