Object Info:

navBar

Introduction

navBar is a macro that builds navigation bar showing vertical and horizontal links from the current page. Both vertical and horizontal links provide visual clues to your current position in the site. Vertical point back to higher parts of the site (parents), while horizontal links point to other pages that sit at the same level of the current page (siblings).

navBar can produce two basic designs. The first contains a complete list of both vertical and horizontal links. Vertical links are on the top line and left justified and horizontal links are on the second line and centered.

Exmple 1:
navBar (useNP:false)

The second design is much better suited for a page with lots of siblings. Like the first example, this design has vertical links on the first line. On the second line, however, the list of horizontal links is replace by previous and next links.

Example 2:
navBar()

I like using this design with a vertical table of links to siblings, like the one to the left. You can generate these type of tables with the pageTable macro.

Version 1.5b2 contains a new parameter, showMe, which controls whether the current page is listed with of the horizontal links.

Example 3:
navBar (useNP:false,showMe:false)

This version of navBar supercedes previous versions of navBar and navBarNP released here.

Details

navBar v1.5b2. See script comments for version history.

The navBar macro uses five parameters to build the navigation bar. The syntax is:

navBar(NPadr, useNP, useButtons, glossTitles,showMe)

NPadr is the address of the nextPrevs outline that you wish to use. It defaults to the nextPrevs outline for the current page.

useNP is a boolean, that controls whether the navigation bar is built with next and previous links (like example 2 above) or not. The default is true.

useButtons is a boolean that controls whether the next and previous links are show as text links or as GIF buttons. The default is false.

glossTitles is a boolean that controls whether the navigation bar is build from glossary entries as titles or as object names. Since the nextPrevs outline lists object names, you need to resolve these to page titles to work with glossary entries generated by the stock Frontier pageFilter. glossTitles allows for this resolution. The default is true.

showMe is a boolean that controls whether the current page is listed in the horizontal links or not. The default is true.

The navBar macro is build based on a structured nextPrevs outline. All vertical and horizontal links are built from the outline structure. The order which both parents and siblings appear in the nextPrevs outline determines the order that links are shown. Your links do not have to be in alphabetic order.

You may take a nextPrevs outline generated by Frontier's "Build nextPrev List..." and add structure to it, or you may use the webExtras v 1.5 suite's "Build Structured NP..." command (which will do most of the work for you). You can also use the structuredNP script, to generate a structured outline of your site. The outline structure does not have to mimic the site structure (though it is a little hard to imagine a why you would build an outline structure that wasn't at least a little similar to the site structure).