Page as "Home" navigation setup?

[photoman355]

I have a slightly unusual setup where I'm using the first child of the root as my homepage like so:

 

Root

      Home

      Page 2

      Page 3 

      etc

 

This is presenting me with a slight problem in that I need the Home url in the navigation tree to redirect to Root.  Here's my navigation setup:

 

<?php
$root = $pages->get("/");
$children = $root->children();
foreach($children as $child) {
    echo "<li><a href='#{$child->name}'></a><a href='{$child->url}'><h1>{$child->title}</h1></a></li>";
}
?>

I'm sure there's a nice easy way to do this in PW, can anyone help?

For data setup I have Home rendered in the Root page.  Looking at SEO would simply changing the menu structure be enough to stop robots indexing the root/Home url so that Home is seen as Root?  

[MichaMichaMicha]

There is. Straight from the Basic Profile that comes with ProcessWire:

$homepage = $pages->get("/"); 
$children = $homepage->children;
$children->prepend($homepage); 

foreach($children as $child) {
	$class = $child === $page->rootParent ? " class='on'" : '';
	echo "<li><a$class href='{$child->url}'>{$child->title}</a></li>";
}

Edit: I'm reading your question again and I'm not sure this is helping you.

Wouldn't it be better to rename Root to Home and delete the current Home living under Root?

Edit2: I'm now reading the first sentence of your question and finding myself completely useless...

Edited May 30, 2013 by MichaMichaMicha

[horst]

 There is. Straight from the Basic Profile that comes with ProcessWire:

$homepage = $pages->get("/"); 
$children = $homepage->children;
// $children->prepend($homepage); 

foreach($children as $child) {
	$class = $child === $page->rootParent ? " class='on'" : '';
	echo "<li><a$class href='{$child->url}'>{$child->title}</a></li>";
}

Hhm, I think there is already the solution within the Basic Profile as you shown above.

But you should not prepend the $homepage.

This will output :

 

      Home

      Page 2

      Page 3 

      etc

 

is this what it should be?

[kongondo]

I have a slightly unusual setup where I'm using the first child of the root as my homepage like so:

 

Root

      Home

      Page 2

      Page 3 

      etc

 

This is presenting me with a slight problem in that I need the Home url in the navigation tree to redirect to Root.  

For data setup I have Home rendered in the Root page.  Looking at SEO would simply changing the menu structure be enough to stop robots indexing the root/Home url so that Home is seen as Root?  

How I understand it....

When user clicks on "Home" he should be redirected to "Root".

I suggest to put the redirect in the Template for Home to redirect to Root. This means Home will still have unique "Home" url but redirection will happen. Or else, if you want Home to have Root's address in the menu itself, then you will need to use some if statement....

I hope I understood you

[Wanze]

May I ask the question: Why this setup?

Makes no sense for me if you are redirecting Home to Root, why do you need Home?

[photoman355]

Many thanks guys.  I knew about the prepend option but it doesn't solve the problem because then you get this structure in the nav:

Root

Home

Page 1

Page 2

Root's name should be the name of the "Home" page.  I have come up with a solution for this which solves the menu problem however it doesn't create a permanent redirect for the root/home url and it breaks my scrollspy for some reason.  

<?php
	$root = $pages->get("/");
	$child = $root->child();
	if ($child) { echo "<li class='#{$child->name}'></a><a href='{$root->url}'><h1>{$child->title}</h1></a></li>";
	} 
	$root = $pages->get("/");
	$first = $root->child();
	$children = $root->children()->not($first);
	foreach($children as $child) {
		echo "<li class='#{$child->name} {$active}'></a><a href='{$child->url}'><h1>{$child->title}</h1></a></li>";
	}
?>

@kongondo's Your suggestion of putting the redirect in the Template for Home makes a lot of sense but I still need to pull in the code from Home to the Root page so would need to bear that in mind.  I'd definitely need the menu to tie up.  Can you suggest how I'd go about this?  From an SEO point of view is changing the menu enough to stop robots finding the root/Home url?

@Wanze I know it's a bit of a strange setup.  I have several pages as content blocks so putting them in the backend structure as suggested could get messy from a client point of view.  If Root was Home it would look something like this:

Root

    Block 1

    Block 2

    Block 3

    Page 1

        Block 1

        Block 2

    Page 2

        Block 1

    etc

[ryan]

Just wanted to mention you should change this:

$child = $root->child();
if ($child) {

To this: 

$child = $root->child();    
if ($child->id) {

[kongondo]

@kongondo's Your suggestion of putting the redirect in the Template for Home makes a lot of sense but I still need to pull in the code from Home to the Root page so would need to bear that in mind.  I'd definitely need the menu to tie up.  Can you suggest how I'd go about this?  From an SEO point of view is changing the menu enough to stop robots finding the root/Home url?

You can use PW $page->render() method to pull in the content of Home into the Root page. See cheat sheet and/or search forums for more. You could also just use normal PW variables to output certain fields from "Home" into the Root page. If you use render, you want to make sure the HTML in the Home page is minimal (render will pull in the whole markup so you may end up with duplicate body, head, etc. tags, i.e. Root's and Home's .

As for SEO, I don't know what effect this would have, sorry.

[MichaMichaMicha]

Just wanted to mention you should change this:

$child = $root->child();
if ($child) {

To this: 

$child = $root->child();    
if ($child->id) {

Do you mean the correct way to check if a child is valid is to check for it's id?

Why doesn't the other method work?

[Wanze]

Do you mean the correct way to check if a child is valid is to check for it's id?

Why doesn't the other method work?

If Pw does not find a page, a NullPage object is returned. The id of a NullPage is always '0'.

So the simplest way to check if you got a page back is to check the id.

Just checking if $child is true is wrong, because it returns true also if $child is a NullPage.

see http://www.php.net/manual/en/language.types.boolean.php for a list of things that are converted to false by php.

[horst]

alternative solution:

if(empty($child)) {

or

if( ! empty($child)) {


EDIT: (after Ryans post below)

oh, f**k, it is wrong. (I have to check my code)

Edited June 6, 2013 by horst

[ryan]

alternative solution:

if(empty($child)) {

or

if( ! empty($child)) {
 

 

 

I don't think this would work as I'm not aware of any situation in PHP 5+ where PHP will return a TRUE value for empty() on an object. Assuming I understand correctly, PHP will never return anything but FALSE on an object. Though I think that in PHP 4 it would return TRUE for an object with nothing in it, but not so in PHP 5.

[horst]

Oh. - thanks Ryan.
 
I have checked at php.net and it is noted in Changelog since PHP 5.0.0