Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
I'm very pleased to be able to announce that Sitecore have invited me to be part of their MVP community for 2015.
Continuing the theme of simple approaches to navigation components, this week I want to look at a slightly more complex scenario for the top level navigation in a site. Sometimes you need the mark-up for primary navigation to vary between different items in your navigation. Perhaps you have some pages which need a different style of display because of their purpose on the site. And generally in this sort of scenario you need editors to have some control over which items get these different views.
My son loves the Lego-branded games available via Steam. He's a massive fan of the Lego versions of Batman, Marvel and the recent Lego Movie game. But as much as he loves them, as the owner of the computer he plays on, I've found them frustrating. You buy a game, download it, and it works fine for a while. But at some point all of these games have suffered from a problem where you stop being able to launch them. Having had to figure out solutions via Google to keep my son happy, I'm writing this down so I can remember it next time...
A quick distraction from navigation patterns this week:
A while back I wrote a bit about issues with following the SDN instructions to create a new custom application on your Sitecore "start menu". Recently I responded to a Stack Overflow question about this issue, where after a bit of discussion I discovered that this didn't work quite the same way on Sitecore 7.5. So having investigated why, I figured I should write this up...
Last week I started looking at some simple ideas for the top level navigation for Sitecore websites. This week, I'll continue that theme with some simple examples of the more localised navigation that you might use on content pages.
Most websites need some sort of navigation UI. If you have a site with more than a handful of pages then you're likely to need to create some components for rendering sets of links that show the structure of your site. So continuing my theme of simple patterns for Sitecore code, here is the first of a few posts on some approaches to navigation.
