Galaxy Site Navigation Widget
Submitted by jwheat on Wed, 06/26/2013 - 07:10
I've done some light work with Galaxy sites. As a whole, we are not using them to any great depth, however, for "special interest" sites they're great. The first hurdle I had was to apply the look and feel of our main site to the Galaxy. I'll actually do a future article on how to accomplish this - but suffice it to say - it is somewhat difficulty and requires some hacking on the main core galaxy code. I've attempted to make the mod as less intrusive as possible, but there is still some hacking that happens.
On to the main topic - the Navigation Widget. On the Galaxy site I have the Navigation widget in the left column (original eh?). If you're not familiar with this widget, it is an out of the box widget and builds a link set of top-level categories. Its a basic navigation block, and helpful with a smaller site, getting you to where you need to be. Galaxy sites allow you to use the Main CMS widgets (or a limited Galaxy site specific set) AND allows you to opt to use Homepages the same way the main CMS does. I've opted to use the Homepages and Widgets, giving me more control over what I can do with the site.
With all that background out of the way, there is a little gotchya with respect to using the Navigation widget I wanted to share, and the real reason for this post. To get category links to actually display in this block, they have to have "something live" assigned to them. To my surprise - this does not mean a Homepage. You need something such as a document page assigned to a category in order for it to to display on the list. I struggled with this for a while, and eventually posted a support ticket, because in my mind, it should display since there was indeed an approved Homepage assigned to the category. After I assigned a document page to the category - it popped up in the block. To my surprise (and which makes total sense) - when I click the category - the Homepage I designed displays overtaking the initial rendering of the category, with the normal links to the document page(s) under.
Overall I like how this works, but - in the event I don't want or don't have anything but a homepage assigned to a category - it won't display and I'll have to 'tack on something' or hack the widget code to do my bidding. I'm guessing I may opt for the second option :)
-Jon