Custom Navbar for Silo-ed Wordpress Site?

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riddarhusetgal

riddarhusetgal

Incongruous Juxtaposition
May 2, 2007
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I'm working on a 3 tiered silo-ed wordpress site. I want a custom sidebar/navbar to limit theme bleeding.

By that I mean this:

Main theme is WIDGETS:

Top level navbar is:
-red widgets
-blue widgets
-green widgets

When you click on "blue widgets" the navbar turns to

"american blue widgets"
"norwegian blue widgets"
"brazilian blue widgets"
(or whatever)

vs.

-red widgets
-blue widgets
-green widgets

When you click on "american blue widgets", the navbar just says "blue widgets" or just lists all the articles under "blue widgets"

Does anyone know how to do this - plugin, cut and paste code?
Tx!
 


Page templates would probably be the way to go if I understand what you're talking about. Just set up a blue widgets template that calls a blue widgets nav bar etc...

You can probably do the navbar with if statements too, but I'm not much of a programmer so I use page templates when I need to do that kind of stuff.
 
This is kinda what I mean.
silo-diagram.jpg




I have been playing with the custom page templates but I was hoping there was another solution. The main issue is that the childen pages should only link to parent pages (ideally its parent) and not to each other - i.e. say redwidget childpage1 should not link to bluepage childpage1 or any other page on its level....
 
No need to buy some rapid niche sites fluff.

If you use Wordpress, try inserting the in_category() function in single.php, something like this:

Code: 
<?php
if(in_category('1'))
    include 'single_cat1.php';
elseif(in_category('2'))
    include 'single_cat2.php';
?>
You can then create the single_catX.php pages based on the existing single.php, and customize them the way you want.
 
I don't speak php :s :(

But real quick, are you basically saying I need to create a custom navbar for each main page (i.e. category landing page)? I am using pages not posts. So I guess the pages are basically the category landing pages (silo landing pages above) and the page children/subpages are the article pages. Is this right? The main issue is that when a person clicks on say "red widgets" the navbar lists all the articles under red widgets in the left navbar and the particular red widget article on the right. In other words I just want to list the parent and all the children in the navbar at any given option.

Alternatively it could list the next and previous "red widgets" article (maybe I should use some breadcrumb navigation plug-in??)

With this setup I can create do some pagerank sculpting (I'm attempting to at least....)
 
You can do that with pages too, yes :)
And I would say that yes, each parent page would have a custom navbar if I get you right. They would be the "category" pages.

For next/prev, I don't know if there's a plugin right now but you could do a search for "paginaged pages" or something. Maybe a plugin will show up.

You could also just add this line to the page template where you want that link to show:

Code: 
<?php wp_link_pages('nextpagelink'); ?>

and


Code: 
 <?php wp_link_pages('previouspagelink'); ?>

That might get the job done.
 
bobsoap said:
You can do that with pages too, yes :)
And I would say that yes, each parent page would have a custom navbar if I get you right. They would be the "category" pages.

For next/prev, I don't know if there's a plugin right now but you could do a search for "paginaged pages" or something. Maybe a plugin will show up.

You could also just add this line to the page template where you want that link to show:

Code: 
<?php wp_link_pages('nextpagelink'); ?>
and


Code: 
 <?php wp_link_pages('previouspagelink'); ?>
That might get the job done.
Click to expand...

Thanks again for the tips. It turns out, there are two plugins that help with website architecture (esp the dynamic navbars/sidebar)

Dynamic sidebar plugin
Exclude pages plugin (so you won't bleed pagerank as much)
 
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