# Best way to build a navigation bar with Radiant CMS?

**URL:** <https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-way-to-build-a-navigation-bar-with-radiant-cms/78749>\
**Category:** Radiant CMS\
**Created:** [December 8, 2006, 9:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-way-to-build-a-navigation-bar-with-radiant-cms/78749 "2006-12-08T09:28:07Z")\
**Posts on this page:** 3\
**Page:** 1

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**Author:** ![andreas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/ee7513/32.png) [@andreas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andreas)\
**Post date:** [December 8, 2006, 9:28am UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-way-to-build-a-navigation-bar-with-radiant-cms/78749/1 "2006-12-08T09:28:07Z")

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Hello Radiants (is that the correct title?),

i want to build a website for a client with Radiant. I started with the  
third install option of Radiant - the full featured blog layout of  
Radiant. However this site should be a ‘classic’ website, not a blog, so  
i want to include a navigation bar on the left side. My - annoying (?)  
newbie questions - are:  
1.) Is it possible with Radiant to have a left side bar, too (together  
with the existing right side bar of the blog layout)?  
2.) Can i use this new sidebar as a navigation bar or exists other  
Radiant specific constructs for this purpose?  
3.) Are there other ‘best practice’ to follow or has anybody hints to  
consider for this task (building a simple navigation bar in Radiant)?

Thanks in advance for some help!

Greetings,  
Andreas S.

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**Author:** ![andreas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/ee7513/32.png) [@andreas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andreas)\
**Post date:** [December 8, 2006, 3:34pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-way-to-build-a-navigation-bar-with-radiant-cms/78749/2 "2006-12-08T15:34:45Z")

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Andreas,

1. The short answer is that Radiant can do whatever you like visually;  
it  
doesn’t restrict you! So feel free to design your pages in whatever  
tool  
you want, then break them into logical parts (focusing on structure and  
reuse), then import them into Radiant. There are a lot of different  
strategies to implementing your pages in Radiant, but that would be a  
book-length topic! The typical practice is to have layouts that  
describe  
the overall structure of pages, with various Radius tags to include  
pieces  
of the rendered page; pages that have the actual content in multiple  
parts;  
and snippets that are frequently reused pieces of HTML or Radius tags.

2. Look for information on the \<r:navigation\> tag on the wiki, weblog,  
and  
in the source code. While it’s kind of inflexible (I’m working on a  
patch  
for that issue), it does the job well enough in most cases.

3. The only “best practice” I can cite is to use standards-based  
HTML/CSS  
(which nowadays means using lists for navigation menus), but that goes  
for  
any website.

Hope this helps,

Sean C.  
[seancribbs.com](http://seancribbs.com)

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<div class="post-metadata">

**Author:** ![andreas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/letter_avatar_proxy/v4/letter/a/ee7513/32.png) [@andreas](https://www.ruby-forum.com/u/andreas)\
**Post date:** [December 8, 2006, 3:48pm UTC](https://www.ruby-forum.com/t/best-way-to-build-a-navigation-bar-with-radiant-cms/78749/3 "2006-12-08T15:48:47Z")

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Andreas,

Atop what Sean said, or rather, to reiterate: Radiant is no different  
than any other CMS/Blog tool insofar as presentation layer is  
concerned, perhaps a bit more flexible, if anything.

I personally base my “designs” (I admit it, I’m not a web designer) on  
XHTML strict and CSS 2, after that I look at the current root-level  
page that comes with Radiant. And then substitute with radius tags any  
page parts that require iterating over a list (possibly in the DB). In  
a way it is not that different than writing an XSLT/XPath template.