Has anyone run into issues with users creating folders with non-standard naming conventions so that their navons are displayed with a friendly display title? Is there a way to validate folder names so that they are usable for publishing? Can the folder name populate the display name of the navon rather than the sys_title? Is there a way to add a display title field to the folder so that it could be a one to one mapping with the navon content item?
Thanks,
Steve
Hi Steve,
You asked a lot of questions at once, and I probably don’t understand exactly what you mean in each case. It sounds like you expect folder names and navon names to be the same, but I don’t think I do. The title of a navon can be customized: “Wisdom from the CEO.” Yes, the folder name usually appears in the URL, as in our-company.com/foldername/. The Location Scheme determines whether it does and that can be edited. But the navon can be renamed as friendly as you like: “BossDumbIdeaNav.” It doesn’t need to stay the same as the folder name. So the folder name, navon sys_title, and title can and should all be different, in my opinion. Depending on what you mean by “validate folder names so that they are usable for publishing,” you might find some insight from http://forum.percussion.com/showthread.php?t=331
Thanks for your response Michael. I agree with you in that the navon display title should be customizable but I am wondering how you avoid the extra step of renaming the navon each time a new folder is created?
Here is my use case:
A user wanted to create a new link with the display title being ‘Did you know?’. They clicked on their section folder and created a new folder, since they knew that their folder name would generate the name of the navon they entered ‘Did you know?’ as the folder name which in turn created a navon with ‘Did you know?’ as the display name and sys_title. When the page was published the link to the folder looked like this ‘/homepage/Did you know?/index.html’.
I am starting to think that maybe the validation is broken for my navon items because when I go to create a new navon I can add any characters I want into the sys_title field without a problem.
I am just wondering:
1.Why aren’t folder names validated since ‘Did you know?’ would not be considered a valid folder name upon publishing?
2.Why isn’t the navon sys_title validated when the folder is created?
I know that many developers don’t depend on folders for publishing as we do, so maybe they don’t care if the folder name is legal for the Web. Fortunately, my current validation prevents me from adding folders called “Did You Know?” or even “Did You Know”.
What I did (thanks, Jit et all) was to go to Content Types Global Configuration (under the Content Types tab), click on sys_title, All Properties, Validation, and add a Regular Expression validation type with a value of [a-zA-Z0-9_-]+. I also have the Extension: sys_ValidateUniqueName, which is apparently what generates the error message when I try to use spaces or question marks in the folder name.
It might be nice for Content Explorer to display titles instead of sys_titles, though some of these SEO keyword-rich titles can get pretty long. I can think of some Percussion customers who don’t hold back on the length of their titles.
It does involve an extra step, but I wonder if the best solution is training users to edit their own navon titles. (Except that Fast Forward only allows administrators to work with navigation - a configuration that we changed pretty quickly.) But I would hope a user would see reason if you explained that they don’t really want “Did You Know?” as part of their URL.