Dynamic navigation is important to the success of any website. By providing a logical and graphical representation of a website’s hierarchy, dynamic navigation tools allow websites to be more intuitive to visitors. In addition to helping visitors find their way around your website, dynamic navigation is also easy to manage on the back end.
In Cascade Server, dynamic navigation menus are created through the use of index blocks, which are blocks that index the content of a specified folder or portion of the site. Since index blocks dynamically update content, whenever new content is created or content is modified, the changes will automatically be reflected in the navigation across your site.
In Cascade Server, there are six main types of dynamic navigation:
Menus: - Navigation menus are created to provide visitors with links to different areas of the site. They can simply link to the site's primary areas, include more in-depth sub-levels of pages, or even expand as visitors navigate deeper into the site.
Breadcrumbs: - Dynamic breadcrumbs show a backwards trail of links, from the current page back to the homepage, which help visitors understand where they are within a site's hierarchy.
Previous/Next: - Previous/Next navigation links allow visitors to quickly and easily access related pages without having to click back through a directory; this allows for a more cohesive and streamlined experience when viewing content.
Recent Pages: - Adding a Recent Pages list to your site provides a way to present recently added content, such as blog posts or press releases, in a summarized and easily viewable format.
Site Map: - Site maps provide an aggregated and comprehensive outline of all pages within a site, so visitors may quickly find and navigate to pages they're looking for, or browse the content of your site.
Site Index: - A site index provides an alphabetical listing of every page on a site, and links to those pages as well, enabling visitors to quickly find exactly they are looking for.
All of the aforementioned dynamic navigation elements are easy to set up in Cascade Server. For example, to create Breadcrumbs, a type of dynamic navigation that typically appears on every page (except the index), simply create an index block with the following options:
These options will create a usable index block that can then be plugged into a page region at the template, configuration set, or page level. Breadcrumbs typically don't change throughout a site, so it's easiest to go ahead and add it at the template level, so that it will appear on all pages.
Additionally, Cascade allows you to style the results rendered by these index blocks by applying an XSL stylesheet. **Note -- If you are already using and/or demoing Cascade Server, examples of stylesheets are included with the system and can be found in: /common/stylesheets/index