Managing Menus

The DSM CMS manages all of your menus for you.  One of the questions that I was asked most often when I worked with other open source CMS's was why it takes so many steps to create a page and add it to a menu.  When you create a page in the DSM CMS it automatically adds it to your site menu. 

Note: It is nice to have the system do things like creating menus for you, but not always appropriate.  You can turn the auto menu function off in site settings.

For this tutorial we are going to add a sample page in the site root.  Check out creating a page if you need a refresher for this.

Now we will take a look at the front end to see how the system added our new page to the site...

As you can see in (1) the system added our new page to the menu.  Note the following points:

• it uses the page title as the default menu label
• it adds the page to the end of the menu

This might be ok is some situations, but we need a little more control.  Go back to the admin site, then click the manage menus link on the page tab.

You will see the current menus listed on the left hand side (1).  Note that the system has created a menu for each of your site folders (it considers any page that has a child page to be a folder).

We will click the main menu from this list.  The main menu opens (2).

The menu is displayed as a list of controls.  I blew up one row to make it easier to see the individual options.

1. the arrows are the handle to reposition the menu item
2. the text box is the optional menu label
3. the page icon is a link to the actual page
4. in this example this item has a submenu.  click the menu icon to open that menu
5. finally it displays the default menu label (the page title)

In this tutorial we will want to make sure our viewers know this is a test page, so we will update the menu label...

Then we will move this page up to the top of the menu for the fun of it.  You do this by clicking on the arrows, then hold the mouse button down and drag the page up.

Finally click Save Changes, and take a look at the front end of the site.

 So everything went according to plan.  Our test page is on the menu where we want it and with a much more descriptive label (1).