Best Practices: URLs & Menus

Seeds CMS's navigation menu and the URLs of your pages are generated automatically based on your website setting within Seeds CMS.

Creating & Managing Menus

Every page that you create will, by default, be added to your website's navigation menu. Once you have more than a few pages on your website, you should organise them into sections, in order to help visitors to your website find what they are looking for. To do this, you need to group your pages together into groups with a similar theme, and then order them into "parents" and "children". These sections will often form the basis of your website's menu system; a general "parent" page will be at the top of the menu with the related "children" pages underneath.

Seeds CMS also allows you to make parent pages without having to add content to them. In this instance, a parent page is only visible as part of the menu, for example to allow the grouping together of a number of other pages, but it cannot be clicked on. To do this:

  • set the page's content type to Javascript
  • in the special content field that appears, add return false;. 

You may find it easier to arrange your pages/menus in the Order Pages tool, available in the "Pages" section of your site's admin panel. On this tool, pages are displayed as lines that you can drag & drop as you wish, and it also allows you to manage parent/child relationships by dragging a page (or set of pages) right or left underneath a parent page.

If you don't wish a page to be visible in the menu then you can exclude it manually. Pages excluded from the menu will only be accessible to visitors clicking on a link to that page or who type the exact URL into their navigator. Alternatively, if you don't wish the page to be visible to anyone at the moment, you can de-activate it completely. Read more about this in our guide to Pages.

URLs

The URL is the link to any given page of your website; it may also be called a web address or link and it usually shows in the address bar of your browser. For example, the URL of this page is http://seeds.sesameweb.net/doc/en/best-practices/urls-and-menus/. 

For your Seeds CMS website, the URLs of your pages will be automatically generated depending on the name of the page and the names of any parent pages. If we take this page as an example:

  1. seeds.sesameweb.net/doc/ = the base address of this website
  2. en/ = the language of the page
  3. best-practices/ = the parent page of this page
  4. urls-and-menus/ = the title of this page

Important: changing pages' order and parent/child relationships automatically changes the URL structures of your site's menu, so some pages may no longer be found if you have moved them to a sub-section for example. You can use the  Redirects tool to add a permanent redirect from the old URL towards the new URL (make sure you made a note of your URLs before making changing their order!). We recommend not changing the structure of your website's menus too regularly, as it may confuse search engines if you don't do it properly.