I am trying to get feedback and ideas for solving an information architecture / content management problem using wordpress.
I have a large site ( 1,000+ pages, hundreds of posts ) made up of sections. Each section needs its own secondary navigation menu that contains both pages and custom links. This is easily done, but not necessarily easy to manage ( for non-programmers ).
Imagine this structure:
Parent 1
- Page 1a
- Page 1b
- Page 1c
- Custom Link 1d
Parent 2
- Page 2a
- Page 2b
- Parent 3
- Page 3a
- Page 3b
- Custom Link 3c
- Page 2d
- Custom Link 2e
Here are the solutions I have come up with ( and noted problems ):
Create menus using the normal WP 3 + navigation system. Associate each parent page with a menu ( through a custom meta tag / taxonomy / slug / other ), then on each page grab it's parent ( if it does not have children itself ) and display the correct menu
- Problems? Plenty! Since this is a large site, it will contain many menus making maintenance confusing.
- Adding pages becomes a hassle - add the page, declare the correct parent page, then add the page again to the correct menu ( could be simplified by attaching this last piece programmatically to the save_page hook ).
- What if a user adds a page and declares a parent page that does not have a menu associated with it?
- Keeping track of the parent page - menu association will be tedious and not intuitive
- Use multisite - each site gets its own menu that is shown on all of the pages contained within.
- Many issues with multisite ( plugins, server resources, etc )
- This is really only one large site, not a network of different but interconnected sites
- Forgo the WP 3+ navigation system, instead create pages for ALL menu items ( including custom links ) and use a plugin / forwarding / redirect to change certain dummy pages into custom links. Use wp_list_pages to programmatically create menus based on page parent relationship
- There will be a lot of actual pages already, adding fluff ( pages which just redirect ) to the pages list is probably not a good idea
- Use custom post types for each section of the site, with a menu for each custom post type
- How do we replicate the nesting shown above ( Parent 3 nested in Parent 2 )?
- Many of the same issues as #1 above
I hope my explanation of the problem and possible solutions are clear - if not, please ask away. Otherwise, any feedback or ideas as to how to accomplish this are very welcome.