Pages vs Structure vs Taxonomy vs NavEE (EE2)

Hey Apart!

I’m actually the lead developer for NavEE. We intentionally didn’t look at the other offerings when we created NavEE, so as to approach the problem without any preconceived notions, so I can really only speak to NavEE.

The idea with NavEE, is that it is COMPLETELY divorced from content. You can build any kind of navigation you want, you don’t even need to have content for the pages that are in your navigation. We found that when working with clients, there was always that ONE exception that made working strictly inside the confines of content impossible. Things like, “Oh, we need a link out to our partner site”, or “We want this to link to the store, which is through a third party service”, etc.

So basically, with NavEE, you build your site just like you would with any normal EE installation. Then you build your navigation and drop it into your templates.

NavEE is smart enough to recognize the page you are on, and add a class of “selected” if the page is found anywhere inside your navigation tree. It can do all sorts of things like that actually.

At the end of the day, it’s really just a robust hierarchy management system which is aware of your current page, and can do things like build breadcrumbs, etc. We wanted to keep it simple enough that anybody could use it!

Hope that helps out some!

Michael Witwicki

Hi all! I’ve been trying to figure out what the fundamental differences are between the page and navigation modules and in what scenario’s to best use which. Any experiences here with multiple of these modules? Thanks!

Well i can’t really speak for structure or navee but i can say that i really love taxonomy! It’s an awesome module to build navigation with:

Hierarchical menu structure You can have it on the publish page so the user can add an entry to the menu easily It adds css classes to each item by using the menu name as_the_css_name Outputs clean html Has a really nice module interface [edit - i forgot to add these features!] Creates a breadcrumb if needed You can make a menu item an external link or whatever url you want Gives a menu item a “selected” css class when on that page

Why don’t you give it a try, it is the only free one out of the three after all!

Hey,

I built taxonomy because I wanted a more ‘native’ ExpressionEngine approach to page sections of sites. I’ve been building sites with lots of dynamic areas which EE has handled very much out of the box very easily. My sticking point has been with sites that simply require tiered content 3+ levels deep in some places…

As you know, breadcrumbs, dynamic navigation, multiple presentation layers and search results can be a nightmare for ‘static’ sections of your site - Taxonomy essentially takes the headache out of the equation and makes page/menu management quite simple.

To be clear though: Its not intended to give you an overview of your whole site, only sections that you would require it. You could in theory build a whole site overview in one Tree but it would probably mean you’re not taking advantage of EE’s flexibility with categories, entry statuses etc.

Like NavEE, your Taxonomy trees can be divorced from your content - you can build a nested menu x levels deep made completely out of custum urls - internal or external. OR, you can associate navigation nodes/links with content via the module interface - or directly from the publish page.

A key difference with Taxonomy and Structure/Pages is the urls; Structure stores all your urls as site_pages exactly the same as the pages module - so you’re essentially giving an alias to each entry. Your urls can also go very deep to represent where a user is within your site, eg: /about/company/policies/management/disclaimer/

With taxonomy its native in the fact you choose the template_group/template or just /template_group/ for presentation and Taxonomy will append the url_title. The url /page/disclaimer/ or /section/foo could be 10 levels deep and the dynamic navigation and crumbs will be more than happy with that.

Another big plus is that if you need to move a node from 2 levels deep in one branch to another branch or another depth, you can do just that and your uri will be exactly the same. (no more broken links when moving nodes). Taxonomy urls are also dynamic in that it goes by template id and entry id, if you update the url_title, or rename a template - you’re fine.

Saying that, I’m only at version 0.3, and as far as I know the user base is quite small. I’m relatively new to php and you need to weigh that up with the fact I’m not offering support on the level that the paid addon developers are providing (though I’ll help where possible I might not be able to respond right away - you cant ask for your money back 😉

As audiopleb says, its free. Take it for a spin and send some feedback, I’d love to know what you think.

Hey iain!

You going to be at EECI in SF? Would love to introduce myself and compare notes!

Cheers,

Michael Witwicki

I wish I was going :(

Would love to meet EE folks for a nerdfest but alas expenses are not justifiable at the moment… next year.

Thanks folks, for the swift reply!

NavEE and Taxonomy seem to be the only two that do navigation the way I, and my clients, like to see.

I’ll give them both a shot and will bring back some feed.

A*

I work on Structure with Jack McDade and we wanted to chime into the conversation. Overall, our main purpose is to make EE easier to use for clients (the entire point of putting this into a CMS) and help developers build more quickly.

What we provide:

• A single simple interface clients love, shown in a way they understand and think about their site - a tree view • Mix “dynamic” and static content within the same interface - one place to manage everything • More freeform and quick building because templates can be easily reused and a page can be posted to any weblog/channel and use any template you want • A large and growing community of users that are developing add-ons for Structure and providing feedback for future releases • We piggy back off code that the Pages module uses, so your pages are stored in an EE friendly way • Your URL structure matches your site hierarchy, important for usability and seo • Loads of tags and parameters to customize output http://buildwithstructure.com/tags • We’ve “been around the block” and if you’ve hit a scenario or weird content type, there’s almost always a method to solve it • It’s a commercial product, so we have the resources to add new features, continue development and support our users

Hope to see people at EECI. Come see me run my mouth more about Structure during my session. Thanks!

Hi Travis. I have seen Structure for quite some time. It looks pretty impressive. But what makes me really nervous is that it forgoes use of the native Pages functionality in place of your proprietary module. I have had bad experiences in the past with modules that override native functionality. Especially if something is updated in EE that ends up breaking the module or taking down the site. Not that it would happen with Structure. I am just wary. You mention that it piggybacks on the Pages module. Can you talk about what that means? How Structure works with the native Pages functionality. Also, is there any way to ensure that updates to EE won’t disrupt a Structure site?

Brilliant thread for comparing navigation structure. I like the idea of Taxonomy not leaving broken links around. So you store all your static stuff in say /info/entry/sta

Brilliant thread for comparing navigation structure. I like the idea of Taxonomy not leaving broken links around. So you store all your static stuff in say /info/entry/sta

Pretty much, yes. Personally I use two template groups, /page/ and /section/ and assign only those as being available to the publisher.

Only differences in layout really, section just uses an embed to pull out teasers from the children directly below. (You could also handle this by a YES/NO select menu for “display as section” and run a conditional to test for that around the embed.)

Actually that’s another feature I missed out, you control which templates are visible for entry assignment. Your includes group and all those irrelevant templates don’t show up to publishers - you decide which should be available per tree. 😊

Especially if something is updated in EE that ends up breaking the module or taking down the site.

We saw just that with the release of EE 1.6.9. Thankfully EllisLab is awesome enough to seed a pre-release to some developers of popular add-ons so they have time to perform some required updates to the software (like Structure and LG Better Meta for example).

Technically speaking, an update to EE could break ANY 3rd party add-on at some point. It’s the nature of 1st vs 3rd party offerings.

Also, is there any way to ensure that updates to EE won’t disrupt a Structure site?

No, there’s no way to ensure that about any 3rd party add-on really. The safest thing is to check the add-on’s documentation / website and see if it mentions compatibility with the latest and greatest EE update. If you can’t find that information a quick email to the developer / development team should answer that question.

@james As Erik said, using ANY 3rd party add-on can break sometimes, but obviously going without them isn’t really an option 9 times out of 10. He’s also right in saying that EllisLab takes good care of its developers and we were given a heads up to start fixing for 1.6.9 compatibility. We use the site_pages array like the Pages module to store URLs. The good thing is that ours doesn’t require a single long string for each entry, but only a slug and the module builds the URL up to that point for you.

RE: Broken links - we’ve released a fieldframe fieldtype for linking to pages, so if you have instances where that’s needed it stores the dynamic URL and will update automatically. We also have many tags that are dynamic for displaying overview content for example or you can use add-ons like Playa to relate entries. In these cases, both are dynamic as well. It’s all about how you build it.

Overall, Structure is a different way to build, but it’s only for assigning the hierarchy, which is incredibly flexible and very freeform, which makes developing easier and much quicker. Everything you do within templates is what you would normally do anyway, sprinkled with advanced tags and methods as needed. My EECI talk is focusing on building sites with Structure and how it relates to content types. There will be a demo site with code examples that goes live afterwards.

Brilliant thread for comparing navigation structure. I like the idea of Taxonomy not leaving broken links around. So you store all your static stuff in say /info/entry/sta

Structure is mad solid in this area too. All links are dynamic and recognized by native EE functionality and is supported and accounted for by EllisLab. They’ve been pretty awesome making sure they don’t do anything to inhibit modules like this.

Everything is updated automatically, and comes together so easily. I’ve personally built over 40 sites using Structure (even before joining the team) and honestly couldn’t live without it. Of course you’re free to do as you please, but check it out, it’s a life/timesaver! 😊

I’ve posted an updated screencast of Taxonomy which will gives an overview of how it looks/functions in the control panel.

Iain.