Displaying a site map

Why

Some users prefer to navigate a site based on its underlying structure. Search engines also use this information to determine how pages relate to each other within your site. For these cases it is useful to have a site map.

Assumptions

Readers are expected to know where templates go in a site and how they basically work. To benefit the most you will also need experience in CSS to style the end-result effectively.

How

This is straight-forward except for the CSS (which isn’t provided here), but that isn’t entirely avoidable since it depends completely on how you want to display things. On the other hand this does give you a workable nested unordered list with links to the pages which certainly serves the basic functionality out of the box.

Create site_map.tpl containing:

{% extends "page.tpl" %}
{% block below_body %}
    {% menu %}
{% endblock %}

Create a dispatch rule to take /site-map to your Site Map page:

{site_map, ["site-map"], resource_page, [{template, "site_map.tpl"}, {id, page_site_map}]}

Create a Page with the Admin interface and set its Unique Name to page_site_map. Whatever you put in the body will show above the site map.

I haven’t discussed CSS, but the HTML generated by the menu tag is pretty CSS friendly.