Discussion Forum

jesse.glaves

Member

Registered: June 28, 2014

Posts: 124

Menu Ideas

Hi there, I'm looking for some advice and recommended practices for working with menus in Bigtree. We're developing a college/education site, and we decided early on that the primary menu should be very minimal and student-centric (Academics, Admissions, Student Life, About). We love this approach, but it's making it a little difficult to organize the administrative, faculty and staff content within the site. Currently we've hidden all of this non-student content from the visible menu navigation, and have created collections of links populated in the settings section of admin panel, which we use to populate auxiliary dropdown menus and such. Since these pages are hidden from navigation, they don't show up in our main menu, or submenus in the left side of the content pages like our non-hidden pages do. In other CMS's I could just create a second menu for these links and use similar code to parse the structure of these menus like I do with the primary menu. In Bigtree we're limited to the one main menu. Any thoughts on how to deal with this situation? I'm sure I'm just locked into one way of thinking, and I'm hoping you can get me out of the box. I could just create another settings entry, and loop through it like I do with some of the smaller auxiliary menus. However, it would be great to use the same templating approach for the administrative page submenus as I do with the student-centric page menus, since I put so much work into the code that renders the primary menu in student pages. Thanks!

timbuckingham

Administrator

From: Baltimore, MD

Registered: April 2, 2012

Posts: 974

Re: Menu Ideas

There's two approaches we usually take, depending on the nature of the navigation.

For things like a section that doesn't live in the "Main Nav" but a consistent area like the top right corner of a site, we make those pages hidden in navigation but keep all their children visible in navigation. That lets us still draw their child like we do for any other nav element but keep them from drawing in the main nav area.

Another option when we actually sometimes draw two separate navigation lists on the same page is to actually call BigTreeCMS::getHiddenNavByParent to find all the hidden child pages of the current page and draw them in a secondary navigation area.

We also store some menus in Settings as you've mentioned.

Some examples from kenyon.edu:

• The students, faculty & staff, parents, and alumni dropdowns are all powered by settings (I believe an Array of Items field)

• "About Kenyon", "Academics", "Admission & Aid", "Student Life", "Atheltics", and "After Kenyon" are all top level pages that are visible in navigation

• "Along Middle Path", "Visit Kenyon", and "Give To Kenyon" are top level pages that are hidden in navigation. Their IDs are hard coded into the header of the site and we call BigTreeCMS::getLink to retrieve their URL and BigTreeCMS::getNavByParent   to retrieve their child pages.

jesse.glaves

Member

Registered: June 28, 2014

Posts: 124

Re: Menu Ideas

Thanks Tim, this will definitely come in handy. I think the BigTreeCMS::getHiddenNavByParent function is just what I need. I'll play around with it and see what I can do.