Navigation Tags

Navigation can be displayed using the navigation functions. These then use templates to output the results to your page.

Namespaces

Navigation falls under the page management aspects of Perch and therefore uses the namespace perch:pages.

Templates

Navigation templates can be found in the perch/templates/navigation folder.

Purpose Template
Navigation links item.html
Breadcrumb links breadcrumbs.html

Variables as ID values

Value Description
pagePath Link path of the navigation item
pageNavText Navigation text configured for the page
pageTitle The title of the page. (Generally you want to use pageNavText in navigation)
current_page True/false. The link being output is for the page currently being viewed
ancestor_page True/false. The link being output is an ancestor of the page currently being viewed
subitems If there are links to display below the current link, those are inserted here
pageOrder The numerical ranking of the page amoungst its siblings
pageDepth The level in the navigation tree for this page
pageTemplate The file path of the master page used by the page

Values set by page attributes are also available within the template, using the IDs from their corresponding attribute templates.

The navigation functions call the item.html template recursively for each level of a navigation tree. That means the template is processed over and over again for each branch of the tree, with the next level down being inserted at the point of the subitems tag:

<perch:pages id="subitems" encode="false">

As the subitems have already been run through the template and are HTML, we use encode="false" so that the HTML isn’t double-encoded.

You can test to see if the current page has subitems by using perch:if

<perch:if exists="subitems">
    class="has-children"
</perch:if>

Item template

The default navigation item templates does a lot of work in just a few lines of markup. It’s best to think of the template being run for each level of navigation in the tree - even if you’re only displaying one level.

<perch:before>
    <ul>
</perch:before>
        <li<perch:if exists="current_page"> class="selected"</perch:if>
            <perch:if exists="ancestor_page"> class="ancestor"</perch:if>>
            <a href="<perch:pages id="pagePath">"><perch:pages id="pageNavText"></a>   
            <perch:pages id="subitems" encode="false">
        </li>
<perch:after>
    </ul>
</perch:after>

For each level:

  1. The perch:before section is output if this is the first link in the level
  2. We consider each page in turn:
    1. If the link is for the page currently being viewed, it’s given a class of selected
    2. If the link is for a parent or grandparent of the current page, it’s given a class of ancestor
    3. We output the link
    4. If the page has another level to show below it, output the subitem
  3. Once all the links are done, the perch:after section is output