I recently installed Radiant and started playing around with it a bit.
Since I only know html/css I’ve been looking at various CMS systems (the
only other one to really catch my eye was Modx) to figure out if these
could give me easy access to more dynamic features.
I really enjoy how simple the admin interface of Radiant is relative to
all the other CMS systems - deceptively simple even, when considering
the underlying flexibility.
I employ a rather simple (in my mind) 2 level tab-based navigation bar
on many of my websites (example: www.ambitiouslemon.com note: not IE
compatible). I was hoping Radiant could code this in a snippet that I
could call from my layout. But one of the odd things I have noticed
about Radiant is that it has all pages as children of the home page, and
this screws up the built in <r: navigation> tag’s ability to create the
tab bar as I had planned. I have some other problems, but I suspect
thats just because I don’t understand the tagging language well enough -
but the big issue is that I can’t set up my actual page hierarchy in a
way that would be properly reflected by this navigation system.
Is there a conceptual reason for not allowing pages as siblings to home
rather than children? Am I missing something here?
I employ a rather simple (in my mind) 2 level tab-based navigation bar
on many of my websites (example: www.ambitiouslemon.com note: not IE
compatible). I was hoping Radiant could code this in a snippet that I
could call from my layout.
One solution to this problem is to create a page which children are the
pages which correspond to the tabs. For example, you can create a page
called “tabs” as a child of the main page and then create as children to
this page the pages About, Comunity, etc. From your layout or the header
snippet you can take all children of “tabs” using this code:
<r:find url=“tabs”>
Hope it helps.
Thank you John and Eli,
Those tips much more elegantly help me get around this issue, but it
still leaves me wondering why the home page can’t have siblings. Do we
know why this design decision was made?
Joseph B. wrote:
on many of my websites (example: www.ambitiouslemon.com note: not IE
rather than children? Am I missing something here?
Here’s an example of how I’m using the <r:navigation /> tag on
RadiantCMS.org:
<r:navigation urls=“Home: /”>
<r:here><r:title /></r:here>
<r:selected><r:title /></r:selected>
<r:normal><r:title /></r:normal>
</r:navigation>
|
<r:navigation urls=“Demo: /demo/; Download: /download/”>
<r:here><r:title /></r:here>
<r:selected><r:title
/></r:selected>
<r:normal><r:title /></r:normal>
<r:between> | </r:between>
</r:navigation>
|
Development
|
<r:navigation urls=“Mailing List: /mailing-list/; Weblog: /blog/”>
<r:here><r:title /></r:here>
<r:selected><r:title
/></r:selected>
<r:normal><r:title /></r:normal>
<r:between> | </r:between>
</r:navigation>
As you can see you may sometimes need to use multiple <r:navigation />
tags in order to get the effect you want. It’s extremely verbose, but it
works.
You could use this with:
<r:if_url matches=“^/start_of_url”>…</r:if_url>
and
<r:unless_url matches=“^/start_of_url”>…</r:unless_url>
In order to get the second level of navigation to work.
Ryan Heneis wrote an article on Art of Mission which outlines another
technique using HTML level IDs:
http://artofmission.com/articles/2006/06/06/radiant-cms
–
John L.
http://wiseheartdesign.com
I agree with John,
Thinking about website flow and the user’s point of view, everybody
enters from your index page; that’s why many web designers also call it
the welcome page. It is the doorway to your website, structually
nothing comes before it nor beside it. While your internal structure
may have it in the same directory as the index page, the flow of the
entire website logically flows from that one page, therefore all pages
in the site are its logical children. The way Radiant manages websites
may be a little annoying, but it forces the internal structure to
conform with the logical structure that the user sees.
Joseph B. wrote:
Those tips much more elegantly help me get around this issue, but it
still leaves me wondering why the home page can’t have siblings. Do we
know why this design decision was made?
It removes the special cases. What do you find strange about it?
–
John L.
http://wiseheartdesign.com