4.0 Overview of Menu Navigation
You will probably want to design the style and appearance of your menu to suit your design preferences, but to get started we will look at how to create a basic menu at the top of your page, with mouseover/popout effect.
4.0.1 Menu Levels
When we talk about Menus in the CMS, it is common to talk about Levels. The CMS treats the menu tree as a hierarchy, with one or more menu items at the top level, and with each menu item having any number of child menu items.
There is no limit to the number of levels in a menu tree, however a single menu (e.g. the top bar menu) may get difficult for users to use with 3 or more levels, and if your site has more than 4 levels you might want to consier segregating your content into different sites, or Microsites, as supported by certain Editions of the CMS.
We call the top level of the menu tree Level 1. Any menu item which is a “child” of a Level 1 item is called a Level 2 menu item; and so on.
We call a menu item a “parent” when it has one or more “child” items. A menu item is called a “sibling” when there are other menu items which have the same parent.
Note that in a typical Tribiq CMS menu tree, the “Home” menu item will be at Level 1 along with other top menu items, rather than being a “parent” of them. This is not enforced, but if you arrange your site in this way it will be easier to navigate.
4.0.2 Connecting Menu Items to Content
There is one important concept to remember about how Menu Items are connected to Content Items: zero, one or more menu items can be connected to a single Content Item.
The implications of this are as follows:
- a Content Item can be an orphan - it can exist without having a menu item linking to it
- a Content Item can have two or more menu items linking to it - this leads to the idea of redundant menu items.
4.0.3 Redundant Menu Items
If you have an important Content Item on your site, you might want to have two or more menu items linking to it. For example, you might want to highlight your “Contact Us” page, and you want it to appear several times in the menu tree.
In Tribiq CMS this structure is fully catered for. However, it creates the issue that when a site visitor is viewing such a Content Item, there could be confusion as to “where the visitor is” in the menu tree hierarchy.
For this reason a Content Item can only have a single primary menu item. This is the menu item (and hence the menu path) which will be used in a breadcrumb trail.
This makes the breadcrumb trail unambiguous when the visitor is at the given Content Item.
The menu items which point to the Content Item but which are not shown in the breadcrumb trail are called secondary menu items. They are the redundant ones.
4.0.4 Menus and Visitor Languages
Menu items are language-specific. When you are viewing a Content Item belonging to one language, the CMS will only generate the parts of the menu tree which are also in that language.
4.0.5 Menu Sections
Menu items can be arranged in Menu Sections. This is an advanced concept covered later in this Cookbook. You can use Sections when you want a Template to have more than one menu independent navigation area (i.e. showing different menu items as opposed to different views of the same menu items).
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