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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.

For best practice resources, visit the Getting Started guide.

On this page

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 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 only be all direct links with no drop-down navigation, or all have a clickable drop-down menu. This is an accessibility requirement. Follow the instructions for mixed navigation (both drop-down and direct links) if your site has mixed navigation.

  • While you can nest navigation items beyond the third-level, 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".  

 Add a page to navigation by editing the page

Not all pages have this option. When editing a page that does have this option, you'll see a "Menu Settings" section in the right sidebar of the page.

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

 Add a page 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. Use CTA and Link paragraphs to create links to external resources and documents.

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

  2. 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.

    • Enabled: leave this at the default

    • Show as expanded: leave this at the default

 Reordering your menu

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

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

  3. Select and drag the crosshairs to move the menu item up or down.  

  4. Save your changes. 

 Managing mixed navigation

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 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.

 URLs

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. 

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