Overview

By now, you should be pretty comfortable with the basics of template creation and placeholders. The next step is to create a navigation scheme that supports the new site. After implementing CMS, you will find that as content contributors adopt the new technology, it will be literally impossible to keep up with the rate of content additions. Even if you have a relatively small number of content contributors, you're almost guaranteed that they will be able to add more content to your site than you could possibly expect. As a result, the old methodology of manually creating links to the new content has to go. With CMS you can replace that old methodology with dynamic navigation. Dynamic navigation is created using the Publishing API (PAPI, discussed more fully in Chapter 23). It will allow you to create a generic navigation scheme for your site, which will automatically update as new content is added to your site. In this chapter, we'll examine how you create dynamic navigation with CMS.

We'll begin by looking at the various components that are needed to build navigation. Specifically, we will examine postings, channels, and administrative functions as they relate to the development of navigation in your site. Next, we'll discuss some of the design considerations you need to take into account when developing navigation. There are definitely good and bad ways to develop navigation within a site. Finally, we will demonstrate how you can create basic navigation using each of these elements and will review how the BOTS Consulting site uses the PAPI to create navigation within the BOTS site. Once the chapter is finished, you should have a solid understanding of how to build navigation in CMS, using the PAPI.