Site Navigation

Owned by Melissa Chavira
Last updated: Aug 10, 2023
3 min read

There are several options for managing site navigation in the legacy Cascade CMS templates.

The new template - 4v1.1 - versions has a new and improved method of managing top site navigation. Any site created after September 2023 will use the latest template version.

Read: Building Site Navigation in Theme 4v1.1.

Table of Contents

Overview

The top navigation for each site is displayed on a grey horizontal bar underneath the site masthead.

Automatic Top Navigation

By default, your site will be set up using the automatic top navigation format that will automatically create navigation menus for your site based on your folder structure. When creating pages, external links and folders, there is an option to enter a Display Name and a Title. If you leave the Title blank, the page or folder will not appear as part of the top navigation.

 

Subfolders will not be automatically added to the top navigation. There is only one level of drop-down menus available.

Ordering Top Navigation

You can change the presentation order of the navigation by using the Order functionality in the Cascade Workspace.

  1. Click on the order tab.

  2. Drag and drop the pages, links and folders into to the desired order.

Custom Top Navigation

You can also build your navigation by changing the page configuration. This process does require several steps and basic knowledge of HTML.

Building Custom Top Navigation

  1. In the Site Content tree on the left, click on the _assets folder to expand its contents.

  2. Select the top-nav-custom format.

  3. Click Edit.

  4. Build your navigation menu working with the unordered list HTML block. Sample code has already been provided as a placeholder.

  5. After testing your format, click preview draft.

  6. Click Submit.

If you make a change to the custom navigation format, you will need to re-publish all pages on your site.

Configuring page templates to use custom navigation

In order to ensure that the process for creating new pages is configured to use custom top navigation, you will need to update the Site Configuration. Configurations are collections of one or more outputs that are used to display page content. Outputs allow page content to take different forms when published.

  1. In the topmost menu, click on the Manage Site tab.

  2. From the Manage Site workspace, locate the Configurations widget.

  3. Click Go To Configurations.

     

  4. Select the Interior Page configurations.

  5. Click Edit.

  6. Scroll to the bottom of the list to the Top Navigation region.

  7. Click on the top-nav-automatic format to select a new format.

  8. From the Choose menu, click on Browse and locate the top-nav-custom format.
    gif image of this process

  9. Click Choose.

  10. Click Submit.

 

Sidebar Navigation

Each page template also includes options for sidebar navigation. You have the option to manually build the sidebar links or choose an option to present an automatic list of folder contents.

For more information, see Sidebar Menus in our knowledge base.