Navigation Woes

CM1 Ideas and Feature Requests
1

I have an issue with Navigation. There are times when the map of the site doesn’t exactly match the folder structure on the server.

Take, for example, our site – Georgia Southwestern State University (http://gsw.edu/). If you click on “Site Map” up at the top, you’ll notice that there are several duplications. “Library”, for instance, shows up three times:

Academics -> Schools and Divisions -> Library
Academics -> Academic Resources -> Library
Services -> Services

Oddly, our library matches all three of those categories (a School, an Academic Resource, and a Service), but they should all point to the same set of files on the web site.

Therefore, I propose that you create a “pointer” property on a Navigation item which allows me to point one navigation point to its actual file site – like a soft link on a linux filesystem.

Furthermore, I think you should be able to point to files inside navigation. That way I could use a nav widget on, say “School of Computer Science and Math” to point to individual files inside that folder… so you’ll have full navigation for the page.

That way, I can still have “Library” in all three places on my site map (Navigation), but they all point to one actual folder.

/tim

2

This is a feature we have high up in the backlog about managing redirects in general (not just 301s, or for the nav, but more general pointers as you describe). It is too late to add this to 1.2 (already in QA) but we can look at it for 1.3. Also, if we do it ONLY for the nav, then it might come out faster.

As a workaround, there are some things you might be able to do today:

  1. Create most Library content as Assets. You would then create duplicate Library sections and landing pages, but could have one set of Library content assets reused on all those section landing pages. Edit one asset would update all the section landing pages.

  2. Use manual redirects (e.g. in the tomcat config). This is typically more used for links in the nav that go to external sites or urls managed outside of CM1, but it might help or be part of the fix until we add formal support for them in CM1.

Thanks for the frequent posts and updates. It really helps!

3

Really that’s all I’m asking. The physical files should only reside in one place anyway. I’m just looking for a way to have the navigation make sense without duplicating pages.

Let me know when 1.3 comes out so I can download it and upgrade.