The Navigation Model

Organisations, Sites, Sections and Domain Names

These objects are the core of the navigation model. An organisation may have many web sites, each of which may have many sections. A single web site can also correspond to multiple domain names.

The Section Tree

Every site has a root section, corresponding to the top-level URL at that site (e.g. http://my.site/ ). Thus, all content is rendered in the context of a section. Sections are arranged in a tree, ie. each section is either the root section for a site, or has another section as its parent.

Templates

The navigation model also stores a list of templates, and each section may specify the template which will be used to render it. If a section does not specify a template, the tree is searched upwards until a template is found. In other words, the section may "inherit" a template definition from a parent in the hierarchy.

Index URLs

Each section has an index URL, which is what will be treated as the rest of the URL when just the URL of the section is given. For example, the URL http://my.site/news may have an index URL of OCE_Feature/123/1 ; in other words, navigating to the URL http://my.site/news is equivalent to navigating to http://my-site/news/OCE_Feature/123/1 (see Rendering to understand these URLs).