What’s New: Menu Items

A  communication tool that allows you to share micro-news updates with your colleagues. 

Menu items and landing pages

Moving to semantic user interface

Semantic user interface (UI) design refers to the use of meaningful and relevant labelling and naming conventions for various interface elements. The primary goal of semantic UI design is to make it easier for users to understand and use the interface by providing intuitive and familiar labels that accurately describe the function of the different elements.

On the other hand, an unsemantic UI design is one that does not utilise meaningful naming conventions for interface elements. This can make it more difficult for users to understand how to use the interface, leading to confusion and frustration.

Retiring ‘Sections’ or ‘Site sections’

Legacy

Sections or site sections were originally implemented in the Product as a customer request. This was to fulfil a site navigation and information architecture issue and provide ‘Section Managers’ the ability to organise their sections/department/teams content on the site.

Sections provide a link or menu item in the site hierarchy to organise content or build our further navigational menu structures. 

The issue

#1

This reworking and combining of links and landing pages known as a single ‘Section’ forces publishers to create both a menu item (link) and a landing page at the same time. There is no flexibility to create one without the other. Therefore navigation when created is dependent on the need for a section landing page.

#2

The language or term ‘Section’ for both a landing page and menu item (link) is confusing and deceptive or inaccurate.

Industry standard websites and CMS platforms refer to Menus, Links and Landing pages.  And ‘Sections’ are referred to when creating a page layout. For example ‘Add a section to this page’. Most use the term section for a region or space on a page layout

#3 

WCAG definition
Section

a self-contained portion of written content that deals with one or more related topics or thoughts

NOTE

A section may consist of one or more paragraphs and include graphics, tables, lists and sub-sections.

The solution

Updating relationship between ‘Sections’ and navigation

• Sections will now be known as ‘Menu items’ as they form part of a hierarchical menu structure
• When organising content on a site we now refer to a hierarchy of menu items in a menu
• ‘Relate to section’ label references are now simply labelled  ‘Organise’ as in organising your menu or menu items within the menu structure of your site.

Updating the locked in association of a ‘Section’ with a ‘Section’ page

• A ‘Menu item’ that forms part of a hierarchical menu structure can simply act as a link in the menu and not have a landing page
• A ‘Menu item’ that forms part of a hierarchical menu structure can have an optional landing page associated with it.

Define the use of and reference to landing page 

• When planning content, users can now distinguish between content type pages and a landing page more clearly. There is no longer an association to pages and hierarchy.
• Templates will now reference landing pages
• Section widgets will now be referred to as General widgets

Current vs New Role permissions

• All ‘Section’ specific roles will be renamed ‘Menu item’ roles for site users
• This is now specific to the platform and no longer related to any single user group or organisation that uses the platform
• Organisational teams can still retain their unique publishing roles names for their staff such as ‘Section Manager’ or an equivalent in their own team structures and documentation. However this will not be reflected in the defined publishing roles in the site. We suggest using the ‘Job Roles’ profile option to retain or still identify those users with these publishing roles.

Workflow and Revisions

Menu item managers will now be able to create/edit a menu item (with/without a landing page) and set a published date in the future if required.

The workflow states will be:

• Draft
• Published
• Unpublished

Revisions

Menu item managers will now be able to older revision for a menu item based on the workflow state history and activity