SDL Tridion Community Webinar Navigation and SDL Tridion

A little bit about me I’m Mark Saunders, I’ve worked with SDL Tridion for years and years and years I’m based in Brussels, Belgium I work as a senior SDL Tridion consultant for Content Bloom Biggest achievement: Lexus Europe Sites You can reach me via: – – twitter.com/dylanhome

About this discussion We’re going to go through the following: – A few high-level implementation examples for building navigation using SDL Tridion – There is no ‘Right answer’ the aim is to generate discussion about what others are doing – Speak up at any point if you want to talk about something or I’m not explaining very well!

The solution is a balancing act

Creating navigation using SDL Tridion Typically there are a number of ‘classical’ ways to build navigation using SDL Tridion: – Resolving navigation information at render time and publishing it to the presentation server * – Via Content Delivery, the application builds a cached navigation structure – A combination of the two ** With 2011 there are potentially more! – OData – GUI extensions – Taxonomies… – but we don’t have all night and Chris is dying to get in :) * **

Creating navigation inside CME Navigation labels are typically stored as metadata on a structure group and/or page item This could present some issues to consider: – Child publications may localise these items to change the labels Changes to parent are no longer inherited A potential solution is to include a component in each page that contains this information, which can be automated on page / sg creation. But it still isn’t a ‘silver bullet’ – Publishing of navigation can take a long time for large websites ( pages can be common) Often not an issue, but some business users can be very demanding :) Code mechanisms exist to publish only the Delta updates to the navigation XML, but requires some technical implementation

Content Delivery / CME Combo Page and structure group information is published to content delivery – Application code may query database based on current location or website root A combined solution may involve publishing a navigation structure (e.g XML) consisting of TCM ID’s of pages and structure groups. – One API call in CME, and reduced effort in content delivery queries, a balance of the two!

Navigation: custom tools This is a very broad topic, but…. – Some of our clients have requested custom ‘menu tools/builders’ that provide an interface to allow editors to drag and drop SDL Tridion items, perform renaming, ordering etc. – Solves the issue of numbered ordering and structure metadata – Page links are resolved either by the tool or via content delivery. Has anyone out there also built custom tools to aid navigation creation ?

Navigation: Final thought! Many ways to implement navigation, many reasons to consider for each implementation. We’re very interested to hear YOUR use-cases and examples. Let’s have your thoughts / experiences

Thank you for joining this discussion