nav[aria-label="Primary Navigation"] { padding: 0; & ul { list-style: none; width: 100%; display: flex; flex-direction: row; justify-content: start; align-items: start; gap: 30px; padding: 0; & li { margin: 0; } & ul li { list-style: none; } } }

Virtualise navigation menus

bboyle

I'm interested in any tips for tackling the quagmire of virtualising menus, or even tips on implementing menus.

I'd like it to work so that within a workarea, one could browse around the site and all the pages in that workarea would be included on the menus.

Trouble is, some of those pages might be new (not deployed), and if the menu gets deployed it could easily contain links to pages which only exist in that workarea - leading to broken links on the production website.

I guess appropriate QA steps in the workflow can control this, but I'm interested in any technical ideas that may help reduce/manage the problem.

thanks
Ben

Find more posts tagged with

Comments

Johnny

You probably need to give us a little more info on how you have implemented navigation inside TeamSite.

Say for example your navigation is a set of SSI's you can hold on to the updated navigation and release with the newly created page.

John Cuiuli
Sydney, Australia

bboyle

Most likely SSIs, though may decide to embed it in the page.

Problem is, if we have the menu..

Person A adds a page (the menu is updated) and decides to finish working on the page tomorrow.
Person B adds a page (the menu is updated) and submits it.

The menu has links to both new pages, but only B is ready to be deployed. If we update the menu to remove A, then the virtualisation within the workarea won't show A...?

Bowker

bboyle -

We have solved this problem and I'll be giving a demo/powerpoint presentation on 8/25 at the Chicago User Group meeting. The time difference is only ...what.... 13 or 14 hours so that puts it smack dab in the middle of...never mind.

I don't know if I will be able to do a webex presentation yet, but we will have audio conference call (although 2 hours might get a little pricey).

Basically what I did was to build 4 different workareas (in hind-site should probably have used sub-branches):
development
systemtest
useracceptancetest
production

When you are ready to migrate up the approval ladder the menu options are migrated up too. It gets a little tricky when someone up the approval ladder rejects the page and all the environments must be 'cleaned up'.

Johnny

yes, well i see two issues there.

I have done the sub branch thing for development / uat etc before promotion to production. That can be done for all works not just navigation.

If you decouple your navigation system from your actual content pages, IE navigation DCR's generate the ssi navigation sets, and your content pages include those ssi's, you can hold onto the navigation change until you are ready to release the new page.

I have got this working in one implementation and it seems to work quite nicely. It really speeds up the process for navigation changes.

John Cuiuli
Sydney, Australia

Johnny

Remember if you embed navigation into a static html page, any changes you make to the navigation will mean you have to regenerate all the pages affected.

John Cuiuli
Sydney, Australia

bboyle

Sounds good Johnny, but not 100% clear on how it would work.

How do you add pages to the navigation DCR(s)? Are they added as they are created, or must the authors manually edit the navigation? How does this:
a) support virtualisation so that browsing the workarea shows all pages in the workarea on the menu?
b) ensure when the menu it doesn't contain links to pages that haven't been submitted?

Sorry for all the questions Smiley Happy

cheers
Ben

Johnny

Well thats the catch.

It works here as it was a requirement to centralise all navigation changes. That way the IA would grow out of control.

So the first step to creating a page is to first add an entry in the respective navigation dcr.
Then you create the page.

If its all done in the same workarea then you will see the changes for the navigation along with your newly created pages.
When you are ready to deploy the page, you will also deploy the affect navigation includes.

John Cuiuli
Sydney, Australia