Jeremy Davis
Sitecore, C# and web development
After looking at the navigation for sites with a single content tree in many language versions last week, this week we'll look at the other simple pattern for language navigation: When you have multiple trees of content with one language each and you need navigation links to let people swap between these content trees. This approach works best for websites where the structure of the content you need in each language differs significantly.
I was going to stop at three posts on simple patterns for navigation (Parts one,two and three are here) – but earlier this week I realised I'd not covered an important topic in navigation for Sitecore-based websites: How you can navigate between different language versions of your sites and pages. So this week, I'll start looking at language navigation.
There are two common patterns for how you might structure your content in Sitecore if you have a multi-lingual site. Depending on what sort of content you're dealing with, you might choose to:
(Technically, there's also a third option, where you have multiple content trees which may also have multiple languages – but that's just a combination of the two ideas I'll present)
The core navigation controls for these sites work in exactly the same way as the ideas I've presented in previous posts. But if you have multiple languages, then you need some code to display links to let the users swap between languages. And you need slightly different code for these two scenarios. So this week I'll look at the first of these:
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.
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.
