Navigation control issues with BETA - Sitefinity - Front- & Back-End Development

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Posted by Community Admin on 20-Sep-2010 00:00

Hi,

I like the features of the new navigation control in Sitefinity especially the ability to select specific pages - excellent!

However I have found the following issues with the navigation control in 4.0 BETA:

1. When using 2 level tab navigation, a first level tab with child pages does not navigate to a page when you click it, it simply just displays the second level of tabs on the current page.

2. When on one of the pages within the second level of tabs the second level of tabs disappear and the parent page in the first level of tabs also does not have a selected state.

3. When using tabs, all HTML markup (eg. unordered lists) for all child tabs whether the tab is currently selected or not is actually in the source of the page. It is up for debate but SEO recommendations I have read would suggest that only the child tabs of the currently select tab should be in the source. I believe this is also the same situation with the panelbar navigation too.

Rendering all navigation items regardless of whether they are currently expanded or not can have a negative impact on SEO because the number of links in the page and quantity of content before the page content can potentially be too high. Of course if this is a drop down menu then it is a different store however tabs and panelbar page navigation probably shouldn't render the HTML links unless they are in the tree of the current page.

Lastly I think it would be valuable to have a 'plain jane" version in the list that simply outputs a unordered list of pages without excess HTML, CSS or JavaScript. Sometimes all you need is a simple list you can tweak with CSS to form a simple navigation without all the massive amounts of HTML that the rad controls output. Simply like this:

<ul>

<li><a href="page1.html">Page 1</a></li>

<li class="selected"><a href="page2.html">Page 2</a>

<ul>

<li><a href="page21.html">Page 2-1</a></li>

<li><a href="page22.html">Page 2-2</a></li>

</ul>

</li>

<li><a href="page3.html">Page 3</a></li>

</ul>

The "plain jane" version should have these features and properties:

Only output the tree of the currently selected page.

CSSClass - containing div CssClass

ListCSSClass - CssClass to apply to the ul

AddSelectedState - true/false

NumberOfLevels - integer with the number of levels the list should go down too.

ApplyPageNameAsCssClass - true/false - if true then the <li> gets a class applied based on Page name eg.

<li class="page_2-2"><a href="page22.html">Page 2-2</a></li>

This control could then be used for simple navigations such as footer links etc without onerous HTML.

Cheers,

Seth

Posted by Community Admin on 22-Sep-2010 00:00

Hello Seth Cleaver,

Thank you for submitting your feedback on the Navigation control in the Beta version.

Can you please tell us which browser you are experiencing issues described in the first point. I have tested this in FF 3.6.x and was not able to reproduce the issue. Issue described in point 2 is however reproducible and will log this as a bug.

As for point 3 - I will pass your request for the markup of the tabbed navigation. The Navigation control for now is utilizing a number of RadControls that are used for navigation - RadMenu, RadTabStrip, RadTreeView, and RadSitemap. The default behavior of the TabStrip is to output all the links and hide them through CSS. Here we re talking about load on demand - the tab strip to populate child items only when hovered or clicked.

As for the lite html version - we have two modes that have similar behavior: SiteMap divided in rows, and SiteMap divided in columns. This uses RadSiteMap and outputs the navigation links as children of li tags.

All the best,
Radoslav Georgiev
the Telerik team

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