Menus

Most websites have a few navigations: the main menu at the top, some links in the footer, a small “legal” menu with the imprint and privacy policy. In Manablox you build each of them under Menus, and the website asks for them by name.

A menu is separate from the content tree. The tree says where a page lives; a menu says where it is linked from. The same page can be in the main menu and in the footer at the same time.

Seeing menus is open to everyone in a space. Creating and changing them needs a role that may edit menus; editors, admins and owners can.

Click Menus in the sidebar.
Click New menu at the top right (or press N).
In Name, type a name for people, for example Main navigation.
The Technical name fills itself in. Change it to something short, for example main.
Click Create menu.

The menu editor opens, still empty.

The technical name is what the website asks for, so agree on it with whoever builds the site. Common names are main, footer and legal.

Add entries

The Entries card in the middle holds the menu’s links. There are two kinds.

A document

Click Add document.
Find the page in the list (you can search) and click it.

The entry shows the document’s title and its web address. Only documents whose content type has Can appear in menus switched on can be picked (see Building content types).

A document entry follows the page in every language. When the website asks for the German menu, it gets the German page. A page without a German translation is simply left out of the German menu. The editor shows the language you currently work in, noted at the bottom of the card.

A page that is not published yet shows a small status badge in the menu editor. The website only ever gets published pages, so an unpublished page stays out of the menu until you publish it.

A link

Click Add link. A new entry called “Untitled link” appears and opens.
In Label, type the text people should see, for example Our shop.
In Address, type where it goes: a full address like https://shop.example.com, or a path on your own site like /contact.
In Opens in, choose The same tab, or A new tab for a link that leaves your site.

A link set to open in a new tab shows a small “new tab” badge in the list.

Change the text of an entry

Click an entry to open it. For a document entry, a Label you type there replaces the page’s title in this menu only. That is useful when the page is called “About our bakery” but the menu should just say “About”. Leave the label empty to use the title.

Order and nest entries

Menus can have levels: a “Products” entry with “Bread” and “Cakes” underneath, for example.

With the mouse, drag an entry by the handle on its left:

Drop it on the line between two entries to put it there.
Drop it onto another entry to put it underneath that one.

Without a mouse, or on a touch screen, use the small buttons on each row: Move up, Move down, Nest under the entry above and Move out one level. The trash button removes the entry from the menu (the page itself stays).

A number badge on a row tells you how many entries sit underneath it.

Save

Nothing is stored until you click Save at the top right. The badge next to the title says “unsaved” while you have changes. The whole menu is saved in one go.

The Details card on the right holds the name, the technical name and a Description, a note for your colleagues about where the menu is shown.

Put a page in menus from the page itself

Open a page in Content. In the Placement card on the right, In menus lists every menu that links to it, each with a link to that menu.

Click Add to a menu (or Change, once it is in one) to open the picker. It lists every menu of the space with a tick box:

Tick a menu to put the page in it, untick one to take it out.
Nested under says which entry the page sits under, or Top level.
Position says where it sits among the entries around it: First, or after the entry you pick.

Click Save menus and every menu is updated in one go. Moving the page keeps its entry, its label and everything nested under it. Taking a page out of a menu leaves the entries that were under it in the menu, one level up.

The picker needs the right to edit menus. Without it you only see the list of menus the page is in.

When you delete the last translation of a page, it disappears from every menu automatically.

Open the menu and click the trash button next to Save, then confirm. The pages in it are not touched, but a website that asks for this menu gets nothing any more.

The Fetching it card on the right shows how a developer asks for this menu, for example GET /v1/menus/main. The website gets the entries in your order, with their levels, in the language it asks for, and only published pages. For the developer side, see The SDK.