--- Gerry Jones <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
> I want to create a menu/navigational section for a website I plan on
> building, and I would like to know if there are any easy-to-use modules I
> could use, or if there's another way. My website will have many levels and I
> don't fancy copying, pasting and tweaking the HTML to get the menu to look
> right on every page. I need someway that will make life easier, that will
> preferably, automatically include new pages.
>
> TIA,
>
> Gerry.
Gerry,
Due to the number of responses that you have received, I'm sure you realize that there
are many
ways to do this. As for myself, I have built some rather large database driven Web
sites with
Template Toolkit and I find that I like to have the navigation system stored in the
database as a
node structure. With one root level node, you can have a table listing all nodes,
each listing a
parent node and title. The table would look something like this:
Node Parent Description
---- ------ -----------
1 1 Home
2 1 Poets
3 1 Ex-girlfriends
4 2 Ovid
5 2 John Davidson
6 2 Tennyson
7 3 Lainie
8 3 Carrie
This breaks down as (this will show up with a fixed-width font):
1
/ \
2 3
/ | \ / \
4 5 6 7 8
In this system, you can see how my favorite poets each fall under the number 2 node,
while my
ex-girlfriends (this is an abbreviated list, trust me) fall under the 3 node. Want to
drill down
from number 2? Select all nodes who list 2 as a parent. Want to go back up? Select
2's parent.
Need to find all nodes on a particular level? Select all nodes with the same parent.
If you want documents in those nodes, create a documents table which contain the node
ids that
they apply to. You can either serve your docs out of the database or just have the
paths in
their. This system is fairly flexible and easy to control.
Cheers,
Curtis "Ovid" Poe
=====
Senior Programmer
Onsite! Technology (http://www.onsitetech.com/)
"Ovid" on http://www.perlmonks.org/
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