Anyone not using managed nav? If sub site has complex navigation ( top, left, right, bottom, tabs) I could where it might be easier to assign someone to manually do for each site ( army of intern students ).
Hi,
We do use managed nav, but with the ability to add manual items as well.
Our sites have managed top, left and bottom nav (no right - we leave this for related content, which is manual), but have the ability to add manual items in the left and bottom nav. We also have pages with ‘tabs’, but these are manual.
This seems to fit best, as it gives us the flexibility to do what we want, but allows users to be a bit more ‘lazy’ and takes the huge task of keeping this up to date down to a minimum. It also stops the main problem of accidentally breaking your whole site because no one can navigate anywhere!
If you would like to know how we did this, give me a shout.
Best Wishes
Georgina
Thanks Georgina. Right now our team is still hot for using managed nav for all menus but if things change I may take you up on the offer.
Suddenly my boss and I would like to know how you did this. We don’t like the idea of having to create a navon (or even a folder) for every link we want to add, especially since many of them are external to our site and to the CMS.
[QUOTE=mcai7gh2;3926]Hi,
We do use managed nav, but with the ability to add manual items as well.
<snip>
If you would like to know how we did this, give me a shout.
[/QUOTE]
You do not need navons for each link you add to your menu.
For example if you want to add a link at the end of the top menu that points to an external site, you can simply change the top nav snippet and add the link at the end of all the managed nav links.
It basically depends on your requirement, either you have to modify the way you are building the navigation templates to have non CMS managed links or create navons and have the advantage of workflow and clean code in your templates.
I think I’m already doing something like what you’re suggesting. Actually, I’ve been adding non-managed links to the global template, above or below the managed navigation. Your method means that in addition to a generic SnLeftNav that any site can use, I have to also create SnLeftNavwithTwoMoreLinksForSiteA and SnLeftNavwithExtraLinkThatNobodyWillEverClickOnExceptTheVicePresident. As I’ve mentioned before, I was hoping to stay more modular.
lol@mdmcginn.
We actually allow the use of general content items (non navigation related) on the submenu of our navigation items… We also have “special” navigation items that are triggered by certain characters…ie the header of the site might be triggered by a sys_title of ==siteheader==. Then we have a navigation template that checks for that specific sys_title and displays the content in the appropriate place in the global template.
If we wanted links above our managed nav, I would probably just have something similar, say ==abovenav== and call that navslot with an appropriate template to display that item…
One problem with creating a navon for every link is that it requires me to create a new folder for each link (only one navon per folder). Right now, we have /president/history.html and /president/bio.html (two landing pages in the same folder). So to manage them, I would need to risk inbound broken links by changing the site structure and the URLs to something like /president/history/index.html and /president/history/index.html.
Intuitively, I want to add pages to the navtree whenever I need to, without creating navons first. I think a lot of end users feel that way, though I know there are technical reasons why it’s not possible.
Understood…We had originally gone down that path that in order to add items in the navigation, you had to have navons…but this lead to cases with certain issues (such as you describe) that just seems down right…well…silly (and not to mention inconvenient for our end users).
So after a lot of trial and error we created our own navigation macro that takes into account non navigation items in the navigation submenu. Unfortunately, this did somehow kill our “debug” view of the navigation (why precisely i still haven’t gotten a chance to look at) but it was/is a small price to pay for the convenience of not creating folders and navons just to add a single page (that really should be in the same folder structure as another page).
Is anyone willing to share their customized navigation macro that takes into account non-navigation items in the navigation submenu?
I have been able to include non-navigation items in the navigation submenu, however, I am having the following issues when the currently selected item is a non-managed item:
-
the $axis value is not set properly (which specifies the relationship - ANCESTOR, PARENT, SIBLING, SELF, DESCENDANT)
-
unable to get a handle to the current content item. (The $sys.item.getProperty(‘sys_contentid’).String returns the previously selected managed item.) This alone may resolve the other issue.
Thanks
Georgina
If you don’t mind, we would like to know how you achieved managed + non-managed navons?
Thanks
[QUOTE=mcai7gh2;3926]Hi,
We do use managed nav, but with the ability to add manual items as well.
Our sites have managed top, left and bottom nav (no right - we leave this for related content, which is manual), but have the ability to add manual items in the left and bottom nav. We also have pages with ‘tabs’, but these are manual.
This seems to fit best, as it gives us the flexibility to do what we want, but allows users to be a bit more ‘lazy’ and takes the huge task of keeping this up to date down to a minimum. It also stops the main problem of accidentally breaking your whole site because no one can navigate anywhere!
If you would like to know how we did this, give me a shout.
Best Wishes
Georgina[/QUOTE]