DotAdmin User Guide

The Nav Settings Tab

The Nav Settings tab in the Page Editor.

A ‘Nav’ (shortened form of “Navigation”) is simply a list of links to help your visitors find their way around your website. From the Nav Settings tab of the Page Editor, you can tell the CMS where to create links to your page, and to an extent, what those links should look like.

Note: every DotAdmin website can, and probably will, have a different navigation system, and so you may need to find out a little about how your particular navigation system works in order to use these controls effectively. Your designer will be able to provide you with this information.

The DotAdmin CMS uses two basic types of navigation system to generate links to your pages:

Zone-Based Navs

As the name suggests, a Zone-Based nav lists all the pages in a particular zone. Some, more complex Zone-Based navs also list pages from other zones within their target zone.

Selective Navs

This type of Nav can, potentially, show links to any page in your website, regardless of which zone a page belongs to. However, pages must ‘opt-in’ to this type of Nav.

Standard Nav Settings.

The standard Nav Settings for every page are shown above.

Default Link Caption

The Default Link Caption is used as the link text for all links pointing to this page. If you do not provide a Default Link Caption, the title of your page will be used instead. The Default Link Caption is optional, but useful for pages with long titles which would look awkward in a list of links or where the title does not describe the content of the page very well.

Thumbnail

If your site navigation uses images in links, your choice of Thumbnail will be used as the link icon for this page. Clicking the edit icon next to Thumbnail field opens the Image Browser in a separate window, which allows you to select an image from your media zone to use as a link icon.

Link Weighting

Link Weighting is a method of deciding in what order the links should be displayed in a given Nav. Pages with a high Link Weighting will appear first, while pages with a lower rating will be nearer the bottom of the list. If the position of your page in the list is unimportant, leave this setting at 5.0, which is the default value.

Note: Link Weighting is only one method of deciding the order of links—your site navigation may use a different method. Other methods include ordering page links alphabetically by Title or Author, and ordering by Publication Date.

Hide from Zone-Based Navs

By default, all pages will appear in any relevant Zone-Based navs your site uses. To exclude a page from these navs, check this checkbox. You may want to check this box if the page is simply an accompaniment to another page, and not meant to be read on its own.

Note: Zone Index pages cannot opt-out of Zone-Based navs.

Hide from Site Search

Check this box if you do not want this page to appear in search results.

Selective Nav Placements

Selective Nav Settings.

For each Selective nav used in your site, a row of settings will appear here in the Selective Nav Placements area of the Nav Settings tab. In the example shown above, the site is using a Selective nav named ‘Support’.

For each Selective Nav, you can elect to use a different link caption, thumbnail image, and short description instead of the Default for your page if you wish. In our example, the Caption for the Support nav has been set to “Contact Information”, which will override the Default Link Caption, “Contact” for this nav.