Thread

Hi,

We are moving our site over to ExpressionEngine and I am trying to decide how to best structure the page navigation. Our site consists of about 300 entries, which we are managing largely (though not completely) through the pages module. The site is organized by departments (music, art, admissions, etc) and within each department’s section of the site we have a different left navigation menu. So the site is structured like this:

-Homepage
   -Admission
     -Page 1
     -Page 2
   -Music
     -Page 1
     -Page 2

The tricky part is that not all department sub-pages should appear in the left navigation, and sometimes links to other departments need to be there. So simply listing posts by category will not work for us I don’t think.

As best I can see we have two options for how to do this, and I am curious which one more experienced EE users think will be superior:

OPTION 1 - Create a new weblog called “navigation”, and have each post be the left navigation menu for a department. Then use relationships to show the proper navigation menu on each sub-page. This seems like the easiest option, but it does mean we have to manually edit a post each time the left-nav changes.

OPTION 2 - Put a custom field on each post “show in left nav”. In a template, select all posts from the current category and filter by that custom field. This feels a little “cleaner” to me, in that we could always just build the left nav dynamically. However, I think we would need a way to get the “current” category that does not involve accessing it by its ID number. I don’t think there is a way to do that, is there?

Sorry for anything confusing or inconsistent in this post, I will do my best to clarify if necessary. Thanks for any assistance!

Mark