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Use the information on this page to learn how to update your site’s navigation, page URLs, and manage redirects on your site.

Info

For best practices practice resources, visit the Getting Started guide.

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  • Menu link title: the text used in the menu for this page

  • Description: additional context text that appears on hover

  • Parent Item: determines the menu structure; <PSU Primary Menu> puts this in your top-level navigation. Choosing anything else nests this item under the selected page. 

  • Weight: helps to reorder the menu items. Ignore this; there is an easier way to reorder your menu.

Things to note:

  • There are three navigation layers:

    • Top-level: displays in the white bar next to the search button

    • Secondary: displays in the drop-down menu

    • Third-level: displays in the drop-down menu under the secondary navigation

  • Your site’s top-level navigation can onlybe all direct links with no drop-down navigation, or all have a clickable drop-down menu. This is an accessibility requirement. Follow these [the instructions for mixed navigation] (both drop-down and direct links) if your site has mixed navigation.

  • You While you can nest navigation items beyond the third-level, but they will all display the same as third-level navigation.

  • If you have secondary menu items with third-level items and secondary menu items without third-level items in a drop-down menu, the secondary items without third-level will always group together to the right of the menu.

  • Your top-level menu is limited by the amount of space you have. When adding pages to it, review the spacing to see if you need to rename menu link titles so it doesn't look "shoved together".  

Adding to navigation by editing a
Expand
titleAdd a page to navigation by editing the page
page

Not all pages have this option. When editing a page that does have this option, you'll see a "Menu Settings" option section in the right sidebar of the page, if this option is available.If you have one of those pages, check the .

To add the page to your site’s navigation, expand the “Menu Settings” and select “Provide a menu link” box to add the link.

  • Menu link title is the actual displayed text. Make it topical and focused.

  • Description is text that appears on hover. It's not required, and is not beneficial for accessibility.

  • Parent Item helps you build your structure. <PSU Primary Menu> puts this in the top-level. Anything else will place it in a sub-menu under the selected parent. Note: You can only select published pages as parent pages.

  • Weight determines how high or low your menu item will display in the menu. There's an easier way to do this, though, under "Reordering your menu" on this page. 

Save your changes

page to your site’s navigation.

Expand
titleAdd a page to navigation using the PSU Primary Menu

You can add any page to your navigation menu using this option. However,  your however your site's menu should be for navigating within your site. If you want  Use CTA and Link paragraphs to create links to other resources,
do that using CTA and Link Blocks. Go to the “Structure external resources and documents.

Link is where the link actually goes. If you've created the page already, you can start typing the page title and select it

  1. Use the admin menu to navigate to “Structure ￫ Menus ￫ PSU Primary Menu ￫ Add Link” to create the menu link.

  • Menu link title is the actual displayed text. Make it topical and focused.

    1. Complete the form. This page has added options, beyond those described above. These include:

      • Link: where the menu link goes. Begin typing the page title of a published page and select the correct page from the list of options.

     Note: You can only select published pages as parent pages.

      • Enabled

     - leave this checked, otherwise the menu link won't display. 

  • Description is text that appears on hover. It's not required, and is not beneficial for accessibility.

  • Show as expanded - leave this unchecked, by default all our menu items show as expanded

  • Parent Item helps you build your structure. <PSU Primary Menu> puts this in the top-level. Anything else will place it in a sub-menu under the selected parent. 

  • Weight determines how high or low your menu item will display in the menu. There's an easier way to do this, though, under "Reordering your menu" on this page. 

    • Save your changes

      • : leave this at the default

      • Show as expanded: leave this at the default

    While you can use the weight to reorder menu items, it can get rather clunky. This is
    Expand
    titleReordering your menu

    Anchor
    reordering
    reordering
    It can be challenging to reorder menus using the weight. Here we’ll discuss an easier method. However, you can only do this with menu links that have already been created.

    1. Go to the “Structure Use the admin menu to navigate to “Structure ￫ Menus ￫ PSU Primary Menu". 

    2. Hover over the crosshairs next to the left of the menu item you want to move. 

    3. Click Select and drag on the crosshairs to move the menu link item up or down. You can also create parent-child relationships with this (nesting menu items).  

    4. Save your changes. 

    Important note: When ordering your sub-navigation, secondary navigation without a third layer of navigation under it will always move to the end of the sub-menu.

    If all of your sub-menu navigation is secondary level, you can order it as desired. The same applied if all of your sub-menu navigation contains second and third layer navigation. However, if you have some sub-navigation that is mixed, then the secondary-only navigation will always be at the end of your menu structure

    1. . 

    Expand
    titleManaging mixed navigation

    Start by creating one of your sub-navigation pages. Alternatively, if you're adding a link in the sub-navigation to what would have been the top-level navigation link, make the top-level page instead.

    Add the page to the navigation menu, using the instructions in "Adding to navigation by editing a page" (at the top of this page). Important: the menu link title should be what you want the top-level navigation title to be. This can be different than the page name. Save your page.

    Now, follow the instruction in "Adding to navigation using the PSU Primary Menu" to create a new menu link:

    • The menu link title should be what you want to display in the secondary navigation. 

    • In the link field, type in the page title of the page you just created.

    • The parent should be the top-level menu item you just created.

    Save your changes.   

    A redirect is a way to programmatically tell our system that when someone goes to a specified URL, they should actually be sent to a different URL instead. That way, the old URL (which someone may have saved in their browser or found through an old link) will still get them to the right place.

    No, you don't! As part of the transition to the new pdx.edu, we are implementing 1:1 URL redirects. You can read more about that in the Redirects for sites changing URLs blog post. There are some instances where you may want to manually create a redirect, mentioned in the blog post. If that's the case, you'll want to use the instructions on this page to create that redirect.   

    Let's say I have a page on my site: "About Us", and the URL is /../example-site/about-us. However, on my old site, the URL was /../example-site/about-us-0

    The /about-us-0 is not a very attractive URL so I don't want to maintain it for the future. As such, I'd want a redirect. That way when a person goes to /../example-site/about-us-0, the URL in the address bar is changed to /../example-site/about-us. The new (more attractive) URL is the only authentic URL for the page.  

    A URL alias is a way to change the authentic URL for a page (the URL displayed in the user's address bar). Every page comes with a default alias based on the page title, but you can customize that alias using the Managing URLs documentation. It's best practice to have one alias for a page, though you can make multiple redirects. 

    Making a URL redirect is pretty straightforward. It is important to note, though, that you can only make redirects for originating URLs on your own site. You cannot make redirects from other site's pages. You can, however, make a redirect to a different page or site. 

    To make a redirect:

  • Login to your site

  • In the admin menu, navigate to “Configuration ￫ Search and Metadata ￫ URL Redirects” (pdx.edu/site-name/admin/config/search/redirect)

    • Click
    Expand
    titleRedirects

    Anchor
    mixednav
    mixednav
    If you have mixed navigation, where there are both direct links and drop-down menu link in your site’s top-level menu, you must create drop-down menus for the direct links.

    1. Use the admin menu to navigate to “Structure ￫ Menus ￫ PSU Primary Menu ￫ Add Link” to create a menu link.

    2. Complete the form. There are a few things you’ll want to complete differently, though:

      • Menu link title: this text will display in the drop-down. You can use the same text as the currently existing direct link, or change it to something else that makes sense.

      • Link: start typing in the title of the currently existing direct link.

      • Parent item: select the currently existing direct link as the parent item. 

    Redirects are custom URLs on your site which “redirect” a person to a different URL. They’re useful for creating user friendly URLs for pages with long clunky URLs (such as Google Docs or PDFs) or important pages and documents that frequently change URLs. This prevents you from having to find every place where the old URL was in use; instead you just need to update the redirect.

    To make a redirect:

    1. Use the admin menu to navigate to “Configuration ￫ Search and Metadata ￫ URL Redirects”

    2. Select "Add redirect"

    3. Complete the form:

      • Path: 

    ...

      • this is the

    ...

      • custom redirect URL.

    ...

      • You’ll note your site URL

    ...

    To: This is the new URL (on your site). If it's a page you've previously published, just start typing the page name and you can select it from the list of options. You shouldn't make redirects to pages you haven't published.

    ...

    Redirect status: It defaults to "301 Moved Permanently". That's generally what you should leave it as, but you can change it if need be. Just be sure you understand what the other options are before selecting a different one.

    ...

    Save the redirect, then test it to ensure everything works as intended.

    Image Removed

    Let's say the Maseeh College of Engineering and Computer Science had an About page with the URL (on their old http://pdx.edu site) of pdx.edu/cecs/about-0

    With the http://pdx.edu upgrade, that URL will automatically update to pdx.edu/engineering/about-0

    However, the new URL for that page is pdx.edu/engineering/about. We don't want to keep the /about-0 alias, since it's not very attractive. So in this case we want to make a redirect. This is how we would complete the form:

    Path: about-0
    To: (start typing title of new About page, and select it from the dropdown list)
    Redirect status: 301 Moved Permanently

    In this case, the University Policy Library used to be located on the Office of the General Counsel site, with the URL of http://pdx.edu/ogc/university-policy-library

    That page is now a fully formed site with a URL of http://pdx.edu/policies . However, the old URL is likely bookmarked for people, so we want to make a redirect for it.

    The OGC site has a new URL of /general-counsel, so the old URL is automatically transitioning to http://pdx.edu/general-counsel/university-policy-library . Remember: you always make the redirect on the originating site.

    So in this case, we'll want to make the redirect on the OGC site (http://pdx.edu/general-counsel ). This is how we would complete it: 

    Path: university-policy-library
    To: /../policies (you can and should use relative links in redirects, when linking to a separate http://pdx.edu site)
    Redirect status: 301 Moved Permanently

    A 404 error is also known as a "page not found" error. You get this error when the url you're trying to go to doesn't connect to an actual page. This can be fixed using redirects, though.

    That's up to you! Sometimes you have URLs for old pages which don't exist anymore, because the content is no longer relevant. In that case, you may choose to leave the 404 error as is, rather than making a redirect. 

    In some cases, you might already know which pages are going to make a 404 error. You might even encounter them yourself. However, that's not always the case. 

    Luckily, though, there is an admin page in our system that lets you see which URLs site visitors are going to which are giving them 404 errors. To find your 404 error pages:

    ...

    Login to your site

    ...

    In the admin menu, navigate to “Configuration ￫ Search and Metadata ￫ URL Redirects ￫ Fix 404 pages” (pdx.edu/site-name/admin/config/search/redirect/404)

    ...

      • is already added, you just need to enter the text that follows your site’s URL. Example: the Policy Library has a redirect for the Prohibited Discrimination & Harassment Policy (pdx.edu/policies/pdhp). They would enter pdhp.

      • To: this is the true destination URL.

      • Redirect status: Leave this as the default.

    Do note that redirects sometimes take a few minutes to come into effect; wait a little bit before testing the redirect.

    Expand
    titleURLs

    The URLs used you generally see in the address bar are not the actual URLs for your pages. The actual URLs look something more like "pdx.edu/node/123". That's not very user friendly.

    As such, we create URL aliases to replace the node/# with something more user friendly. For most pages, the URL Alias defaults to the page title. However, you can customize it.

    Some content types, such as Landing Pages and a few others, have a "URL ALIAS" menu item on the right side of the page. You can see it when editing the page. 

    When that menu is expanded, there is a checkbox to "Generate automatic URL alias". If you leave this checked, the URL alias will default to the page title. Uncheck that box to create a custom URL alias.

    Once the box is unchecked, enter the new end to your URL in the textbox. The new URL must start with a / - the alias is what will show after your site name in the URL structure.

    Example: If you are working on the health-counseling site and want the URL for the page to be pdx.edu/health-counseling/about, your alias would be /about. 

    There is also an admin area where you can edit the URL aliases for any pages on your site. Navigate to this area by going to: “Configuration ￫ Search and metadata ￫ URL aliases” in the admin menu.

    You can use the Filter Aliases section to find aliases with specific text in them. 

    To edit an alias, click "Edit" to the right of the alias. 

    • Existing system path is the actual page the alias is associated with. You'll notice it shows as /node/### - that's the true URL for the page.

      • If you want to make this alias associated with a different page, you can find the node in the address bar when editing a page. When you edit the page, the true URL (with the node number) displays. 

    • Path alias is the alias you want. use the format /end-of-URL - with that section being what displays after your site name in the URL. 

    Our URLs are structured as: http://pdx.edu/ top-level/page-name. You cannot have the same end URL as a top-level page/site URL (the text directly after the http://pdx.edu/ ).

    For example, http://pdx.edu/research  exists. So you cannot have a page with an end URL of "research" (i.e. pdx.edu/health-counseling/research). Instead, you have to have a unique end URL, such as pdx.edu/health-counselg/our-research. 

    The URL aliases you make will always associate with your site. You cannot make an alias that would connect the page to a different site. 

    Sometimes you'll make a page and it take one alias, but then you want that alias to be used on a different page. To fix this, just go to the URL alias admin menu (as referenced in the above instructions) and change the page the alias is associated with. 

    ...