Site Navigation Menus
How Do I?
I’m working on a large site upgrade from EE2.10 to EE7.5.
Almost all of the addons in use are upgradable, supported, and in active development (Thank you Packet Tide!!)
Except for one which is pretty critical to the functionality of this website - Taxonomy. The site has a very large hierarchical menu structure built using the Taxonomy addon (actually multiple menus). The menus can go 4 levels deep and overall have a couple hundred nodes. The nodes can be links to a specific template with or without an entry specified, can be direct links to a specific URL relative to the domain, or a full link external to the domain.
It would be a huge task to rebuild this in a new menu addon manually. I figured it would be a small development project to export the data tables for the Taxonomy addon, uninstall it, and then script out the transformation of the data into the format of a new navigation/menu addon and insert those updates to the database.
What are folks using now to build complex menus that are easy for site publishers to edit and rearrange nav menu nodes?
The closest alternative addon appears to be NavEE. I’m using that on a couple of other websites and while it does work in EE6/7, the developers at www.theout.fit do not seem to be communicating about it’s future for support and development. I’m hesitant to use it for this project for concern that the site would be in the same situation again soon.
I’ve never used Structure. While it’s now built in to EE Pro and thus an attractive option, I’ve always read that Structure alters the way you build sites in ExpressionEngine, and thus it would likely be a much larger conversion project with a lot of new template code. It may be a more drastic option and more in line with building a new site from scratch rather than converting an existing site to use it. How possible would it be to script out a conversation to Structure?
Are there any other recommendations?
NavEE is a good, reliable choice for building menus. I can’t speak to NavEE’s current or future state.
Structure is overkill, and a lot of work for an existing site, and doesn’t do everything you want, either. It’s a great tool, it’s just not right to solve this situation.
TTFN Travis
Hi Travis,
Thanks so much for your response. It looks like NavEE is likely the leading contender, at least to get us upgraded to EE7.5. I’ve had great experiences with it while developing other EE sites.
I hope to see it and other navigation/menu addons supported in EE8.
Jonathan
I guess the other issue is that devot-ee.com is now in archive mode. No purchases and no downloading. So that likely crosses NavEE off the list.
That complicates addon sourcing. Have you checked the NavEE GitHub repo or contacted the developers at The Out Fit? Sometimes small addon creators are still responsive even if their marketplace presence has changed.
For now, you might need to explore manual menu recreation or consider custom development to meet your navigation needs.