Navigation
When Web Services starts your site, they provide you with the series of folders that correspond to the _sitenav.html navigation bar based on consultation with you. Our goal is to have this information, i.e. these sections, decided at the time of your initial development and not have that alterable by you the Contribute user. This will allow for more consistency in your site and a better user experience. You can then focus on these sections of each site and what you want to say. If you're just starting out developing a site, think IN ADVANCE about parts of your site that you anticipate growing or expanding and we will prepare a directory for it to accomodate multiple pages and images. We will then code the sitenav.html to those directories.
If you choose, you need not have any other directories in your site. The basic rule of thumb is:
- If you think you have a section that merits having its own left hand navigation, it warrants its own directory. Generally, a left hand menu should have at a minimum, three or four separate pages to link to.
- It's better to err on the side of having a directory ready if you think that it will have a lot of content and/or a different left hand menu than the main (or root) part of your site.
- Consolidate menu items where possible to avoid unnecessary directories. This also helps you organize the site better and avoids confusion for the user.
There is a tradeoff... the less directories on your site the better and easier to maintain but the less scalable it is for expansion or growth.
Menus Navigation
The _menu.html works similarly to the _sitenav.html file but you as the Contribute editor will have more control of this information and will be responsible for administering it. The menus are viewable in the left side navigation only once published and seen through a browser. They define the pages that the menu items link to. When one of your webpages is viewed via Contribute, they will look like a PHP icon as seen in the diagram in Part 1. To edit this navigation you need to access the _menu.html file directly.
Editing _menu.html
Editing the _menu.html file is a matter of knowing in which directory this file lives and entering it in the address window of Contribute. An example of a such a url might be: http://mirror.www.umb.edu/budget_office/reports/_menu.html. These menus are not viewable in the general page display within Contribute. You would have to enter the url for each menu per directory to edit it. For details, see Contribute Usage: Editing Left Navigation Menu.
Here is a sample of such a menu as seen in Contribute:
- Contribute Basics (links to Contribute_use.html)
- How to Add a Webpage (links to addpage.html)
- How to Add a Folder (links to addfolder.html)
- Using Styles (links to styles.html)
- Linking to a webpage (links to link.html)
Note: The _menu.html file and the files they link to MUST LIVE IN THE SAME DIRECTORY.