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On this page
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Instructions
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title | Updating navigation |
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Video Walkthrough
You can check out a video walkthrough that covers the basics of managing your site's navigation.
Adding to navigation by editing a page
Not all pages have this option. When editing a page, you'll see a "Menu Settings" option in the right sidebar of the page, if this option is available.
If you have one of those pages, check the “Provide a menu link” box to add the link.
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Menu link title is the actual displayed text. Make it topical and focused.
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Description is text that appears on hover. It's not required, and is not beneficial for accessibility.
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Managing your site’s navigation
There are two main ways to manage your site’s navigation: using the PSU Primary Menu or while editing a page. Whichever method you choose, you will have the following choices to make:
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
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your top-level navigation.
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Choosing anything else nests this item under the selected
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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
Adding to navigation using the PSU Primary Menu
You can add any page to your navigation menu using this option. However, your site's menu should be for navigating within your site. If you want to create links to other resources,
do that using CTA and Link Blocks.
Go to the “Structure → PSU Primary Menu → Add Link” to create the menu link.
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Menu link title is the actual displayed text. Make it topical and focused.
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Link is where the link actually goes. If you've created the page already, you can start typing the page title and select it from the list of options. Note: You can only select published pages as parent pages.
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Enabled - leave this checked, otherwise the menu link won't display.
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Description is text that appears on hover. It's not required, and is not beneficial for accessibility.
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Show as expanded - leave this unchecked, by default all our menu items show as expanded
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page.
Weight: helps to reorder the menu items. Ignore this; there is an easier way.
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 [instructions for mixed navigation] (both drop-down and direct links).
You can nest navigation items beyond the third-level, but they will all display the same as third-level navigation.
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".
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Adding to navigation by editing a pageNot all pages have this option. When editing a page, you'll see a "Menu Settings" option in the right sidebar of the page, if this option is available. If you have one of those pages, check the “Provide a menu link” box to add the link.
Save your changes Reordering your menuWhile you can use the weight to reorder menu items, it can get rather clunky. This is an easier method. However, you can only do this with menu links that have already been created. |
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Adding to navigation using the PSU Primary MenuYou can add any page to your navigation menu using this option. However, your site's menu should be for navigating within your site. If you want to create links to other resources, Go to the “Structure → PSU Primary Menu ".Hover over the crosshairs next to the menu item you want to move. Click 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). 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. Important information about top-level navigationTop-level navigation items can either be a direct links with no sub-navigation, or a clickable drop-down menu that displays sub-navigation. Sub-navigation is secondary navigation and beyond; the items that display in the drop-down mega menu. With the second option (having sub-navigation), the top-level item will not be accessible unless you add it to the sub-navigation menu. Instructions can be found below in "Creating top-level links with secondary navigation". For accessibility purposes, your top-level navigation items should either all be direct links with no sub-navigation, or all contain sub-navigation items. This is because screen readers read the drop-down top-level navigation differently than direct links, so mixed top level navigation is difficult for screen reader users to interpret. So if you have mixed navigation, use the instructions below to create a sub-menu for the single-item top-level navigation links which contains just the link to what would have been the top-level page. 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". → Add Link” to create the menu link.
Save your changes |
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Reordering your menuWhile you can use the weight to reorder menu items, it can get rather clunky. This is an easier method. However, you can only do this with menu links that have already been created.
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. |
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Creating top-level links with sub-navigation (from scratch)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:
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All about redirects
What is a redirect?
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.
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My site is changing its URL, do I need to make a redirect for every page?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. What's the difference between a URL alias and a 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. How to make a redirectMaking 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:
Example 1: Internal Site RedirectLet'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 Example 2: Cross-Site RedirectIn 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 Redirects for 404 error pagesWhat is a 404 error?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. When not to make a redirect for a 404 errorThat'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. Making a redirect for a 404 error pageIn 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:
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Managing URLs
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What is a URL alias?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. Updating/Customizing your URL aliasesFrom the Edit tab of a pageSome 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. From the URL alias admin menuThere 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.
Important notesYou cannot use top-level URLs as an aliasOur 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. You cannot make aliases for other sitesThe URL aliases you make will always associate with your site. You cannot make an alias that would connect the page to a different site. Fixing it when the alias you want to use is in use on a different pageSometimes 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. |
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