Navigation vocabularies

Unilexicon is great for prototyping navigations. Go ahead and use produced taxonomies for tagging the content directly.

In this document we talk about special navigation vocabularies that can be used to pull out content relevant to specific concepts using queries without direct content tagging against the navigation vocabulary. In most CMS systems this won't be needed as the content can be tagged with main categorisation vocabulary directly.


In the case of separate navigation vocabularies discusses here, the display and editing capabilities are slightly different. Navigation vocabularies can have queries attached to navigation points. These are designed to query the CMS database to retrieve content that matches the query. Here, for example, is a main navigation vocabulary for a large website, with the concept Navigation > Secondary > Leadership and governance selected:


Figure 6. Navigation concept showing existing query

The query in this case is:

recordtag="Edu: School phase^cb5c4..." and recordtag="Edu: Educational purpose^9d177...")

This means show all content which has been tagged with "Secondary" from the Phase vocabulary and "Leadership" from the Educational purpose vocabulary. The user can elaborate the query by choosing the "Add another" link and choosing the appropriate linking language (AND, OR or NOT) from the Query pop-up. For example, if the user wanted to add a role of Headteacher to this query, she would click on the "Add Another" link then start typing "headteacher" in the field that appears. An auto-complete pop-up list immediately appears and filters as the user types, showing the options (see Figure 7).

Choosing an item from the list adds it to the panel (see Figure 8).


Figure 8. Adding a query concept

The display shows the concept name, its concept id and its place in the vocabulary hierarchy. The user can remove the query concept ( × ), open the concept in its original vocabulary ( ) or add it to the query window ( + ). When adding a concept to a query the concept will be pasted into the query window at the current cursor location (if the cursor is in the window) or at the end of the query if the window is not currently selected. The user can use the query pop-up to build complex queries. See Figure 9.


Figure 9. Building a query

The user can test the results of a query by clicking the "Try now" link. This sends the query to the CMS and retrieves a list of content items that fit the query with links back to the original content.

This combination of a query-building interface and a testing tool allows the user quickly to build relevant queries for navigation points.

The Order field allows the display order of concepts from a navigation point to be specified. A display order of 1 will bring that concept to the top of the display list, with subsequent numbers pushing concepts further down the list.

Continue reading about tagging.