Organising Pages

[jimmyb]

Hi all at CMSMS

Just wanted to pick a few brains with regard to the way people organise their content in the page manager.

All the sites that I have built recently have all had the requirement of multiple very specific and seperate areas. For example, a recent project was for a medical equipment company who wanted a different mini site for each division of the company.

In order to try and seperate things in page manager to make admin easier I have been creating 'master category' pages and marking them as inactive and then built the page structure of the various sections below them. For example.

1--Medical Division(inactive content page)
1.1----Home
1.2----Products
1.3----Our Team
1.4----About the Medical Division

2--Scientific Division(inactive content page)
2.1----Home
2.2----Products
2.3----Our Team
2.4----About the Scientific Division

This has done the trick in most respects and also makes menu generation easier. Am I missing a trick here or do you guys do pretty much do the same thing??

[heatherfeuer]

I think you've organized your site pretty well!  Rather than create an inactive "master category" page, why not make them section headers?  It will show on your menu as "header" with the content pages under it.  Using the menu style sheet you should be able to make look like the rest of your menu -- it just won't link to anywhere.

[Dr.CSS]

Only home is an actual page all the rest just section headers...

http://multiintech.com/

[jimmyb]

Very interesting tips guys, many thanks for your input 

[Hare]

I made a new thread about this a few weeks ago. I personally think that from a usability viewpoint the section headers are not logical. Let's take the multiintech site as an example (link posted above by Mark).

Ok, if I click on the "Image Map Menus" it reloads the frontpage. I personally don't like this at all. It's confusing to the visitor.

I really would like CMSMS to just guide the visitor to the first child-page when someone clicked on a section header. Reloading the page has absolutely no benefits. It would be better if section headers were not links at all if they don't lead to child pages.

Luckily there's a hack available (well not a hack) but requires messing around with smarty. The nav system can be modified but I personally think that it should be built in that section headers would point to the first child page.

[calguy1000]

Link types can be used as section headers too, then you can redirect to whatever page you want.