Manage Menus

The left navigataion menu is generated by how your folders are stacked and nested inside one another. As you navigate deeper into a site, Cascade links to the parent folder's index in green text at the top of the menu. The siblings are in bold black text, and the children of the current folder are shown in regular black text. The "breadcrumbs" in gold above the page's content show the folder path all the way to your top web page.

The key to editing menus is to remember that, for the most part, folders control menus.

Also keep in mind that menu items can only link to pages with the system name "index."

Quick Tips

To edit the text of a menu item, edit the folder's Display Name.
Breadcrumb links also use the Display Name if you do not specify different text in the Breadcrumb field.
To re-order a menu, change the Folder Order [W&D].
To add a new content page with a link on the menu, add a Folder with index page.
To take an existing page off the menu/put an existing page on the menu; edit the folder, and toggle the "Display on Menu" checkbox.
When you change a menu, publish that folder's parent. For example, if I were to change the link on this menu from "Redirect Page [W&D]" to "University Web & Design," I'd need to publish the /managing-menus/ folder for the change to show up everywhere.

Regarding Redirects

Sometimes, you want a link on the menu that takes folks over to another website. For example, the link on the menu for this page will take you to Web & Design's page on redirects. Because this page exists outside this folder, I created a New Folder with Redirect to link to it. The folder gives me a place on the menu, and the index is only a link - no title, no text. Remember to use internal links for content in Cascade.

Controlling Parents and Siblings

This is the part of the menu the folder doesn't control. If you want the menu of the page you're working on to ONLY display that folder's children (the folders inside your current folder), edit the page and turn off "Show parent on menu" and "Show siblings on menu."

This is done infrequently. Most of the time, the links to the parent and sibling pages give users a way to navigate to related content and help provide context for the information. We want folks to have a couple of ways to get one page up the hierarchy, and on most pages, that's the parent link on the menu and the breadcrumb.

Department and program main pages are an exception. These pages have parents and siblings turned off so that all the items on the menu go to the units' sub-pages. If we didn't have those turned off, your landing page menu would be very, very long indeed. Instead, we provide the drop-down menu so folks can get to any A&S degree program from any page in the site.

Helpful Links

Web & Design's help pages related to this topic