Multi Level Navigation

thatboyjim

Hi there.

I hope I can explain this well enough. I am building a site with CMS and in terms of the front end urls, I want to use a format like this...

www.example.com/section/subsection/currentpage

I also want to allow for this...

www.example.com/section/page
and
www.example.com/page

I understand I need to use mod rewrite rules for this.

My question is in terms of highlighting current page, section (where applicable) and subsection (where applicable).

If I have a url like this...

www.mysite.com/services/copywriting/whyuseus

Services in main nav should highlight, copywriting in subnav should highlight and why use us should hightlight. Which is fine, however (you knew it was coming), if someone manually changes say 'services' to 'services1234', the highlight will break.

Was just wondering how people handle this? Any advice would be great.

Many thanks.

James

ixalmida

I do something similar on my site:

// Assuming relative addressing...
$url_string = $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'];

// Remove starting slash...
$url_string = substr($url_string, 1);

// Break URL into pieces using the slash...
$url_array = explode("/", $url_string);

// Get your sections...
$sections = $url_array[0];
$subsections = $url_array[1];
//etc.

Then, of course, you have to process that info. Doing it efficiently without a bunch of code is the tricky part. I think the best way is something like:

// Initialize an array...
$section["project"] = "";
$section["customer"] = "";
$section["admin"] = "";

// Set the CSS class of the selected section...
$selected = $sections[0];
$section[$selected] = "class='selected'";

echo "<div ".$section["project"].">Project Tab</div>\n";
echo "<div ".$section["customer"].">Customer Tab</div>\n";
echo "<div ".$section["admin"].">Admin Tab</div>\n";

thatboyjim

Thanks for your reply.

I understand where you're coming from... however, my predicament is if someone manually changes the url, the current location styling in navigation breaks. This would be a problem is you are using nested unordered lists as they will not be styled appropriately or even show at all.

Any ideas? I am presuming I need to validate that each segment in the url is a valid page/section?

James

ixalmida

Or you could use $_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'], which should give you any manually entered address. Either way, I think my solution would work for you. If you want to validate the URL, you could just use a multi-dimensional array representing valid paths. Then it is a simple line of code:

if(! in_array($sections[0], $valid_urls["sections"]))
  // Some error...

thatboyjim

Thanks for your help.