Nav-manager navigation in non-CMS pages?

[Joel Kinzel]

I'm curious to see what everyone else is doing for this: We have several projects that need the navigation produced by the CMS available to non-CMS managed pages. To this point we have been creating specific foundation pages, with just the navigation on them and then including those using server-side code in the non-CMS pages. The problem we are running into is that these pages never change (at least from the standpoint of the CMS, I'm guessing because there is no time-stamp update when navigation changes). One other solution of course is to use JavaScript but the problem that I have with that solution is the possibly delay in retrieving that because it depends on the user's client to do the work. If we could get those pages to publish during a "full site" publish (all following/related from the home page) then this would be a non-issue for us, but as it stands, they don't. Ideas? Thoughts?

[Jian Huang]

Hi Joel,

Is navigation emulation rendertag not a possible solution?

-Jian

[Joel Kinzel]

Jian,

The problem is that these pages are not in the CMS at all. The emulation seems like a great solution for pages not in navigation manager (and we make heavy use of it for stuff like news articles). 

In this case though we need to produce what is essentially an include file for pages not in the CMS (such as a seperate .Net application or PHP application).

[Jian Huang]

Joe,

You want to generate a HTML snippet containing navigation generated by navigation manager right?  You can extend the navigation emulation code a little bit and the answer is

Using the simple navigation emulation method found here:
http://simplyreddot.blogspot.com/2011/12/navigation-emulation.html

For example, you can have a header page attached separately and published separately



Then use the anc element to reference which ever page's navigation you want to emulate.

Publish and you now have a HTML snippet of just the emulated navigation.

[Joel Kinzel]

I think I understand now, thanks for the info!