Navigation Structure for hundreds-of-Articles Site

What's a good navigation structure for a site with hundreds of articles?

[shafaki]

The phrase "add content" has been repeated over over and over here, specially by the big earners and more stable ones, and by those experiences with AdSense in general. Frequently adding more content means repating visitors, happy search engines, higher ranking, more impressions eventually leading to more clicks.

Some sites have made it with only 150 pages of content, others have thousands of pages. I have a site with only 83 pages yet I started to feel a problem with its navigation structure. I use a 3 level navigation 'system' at the left (using CSS to hide/show Level 2 and Level 3 links as needed). I use only regular links, no fancy tabbed navigation (actually the site has no images at all). I started to feel that such a navigation system, even though it is 3 levels deep, is a bit restrictive from that small, but growing, web site of mine. I am looking for alternatives for this navigation system. I also use Dreamweaver (tamplates) and all static pages (html) (except for one single page which is php that grabs and displays RSS feeds, and another to process a form).

This arrangement had lead to it not being actually very easy whenever I want to add a new page/article into the site. It is somewhat easy, but not very easy. So now I though of looking for some open source solution that would allow me to do what I need in a simplar way.

There are great open source stuff for blogs and even greater oopen source software for forums and online 'community' management, but is there an open source solution (in use) that allows one to publish many articles and at the same time they are not organized in the blog like manner (like sorted by date and linked to in that way), but actually allow one easily to make a navigation structure that is simple for those articles? A navigation structure that has multilevels (like that of a directory).

Question: What is a good way to start a multi-hudred-article web site, what open source solution to use, or will I have to write the PHP/MySQL code from scratch? (I prefer to save all that energy to write actual content instead of coding).

<aside>I'm from Egypt and live in Egypt.</aside>

[thinkaholic]

I suggest setting up a blog using a CMS such as Wordpress. It's very easy to use and you can add categories to place your articles in. Adsense can easily be integrated into the side bar or article layout. I'll sticky a URL to show you what I did to organize my articles as well as integrate Adsense.

The only other way I can think of is to have a dropdown style navigation that branches out to the names of your rticles, but those are not SE friendly and can be a pain to set up each time you add an article.

I would also try to set up a way to search for articles if you have that many. That will help your visitors find what they are looking for.

[icedowl]

shafaki, you might take a look at Mambo. It has a built-in structure that sounds like exactly what you're looking for. You can set up sections and categories in a heartbeat. I use it and love it.

[rogerd]

I'll second the Mambo and Wordpress suggestions. Wordpress is probably a bit easier to get started with, since it's a blog with some CMS features. Mambo is more powerful and has a greater variety of third party add-ons. MovableType is another blog/CMS solution that is very popular, but it's no longer free for commercial use.

If you are looking for ease in adding articles, it's hard to beat a CMS-type interface. You can paste the content into a form, select a category, perhaps fill in a few other fields, and click "publish" - everything is linked up and ready to go.

[shafaki]

Thanks so much for your suggestions. WordPress is nice, but I don't want just to group my articles into "categories" I actually want each article to have its own link in a multi-level hierarchy of links. A multi-level hierarchy navigation system is what I am looking for, not a flat navigation system like that present in the content management systems I know of.

Most content management systems seem to be be geared towards "communities" of publishers, while I need a solution focused on publishing my own articles only. A blog organizes stuff by date, which again only offers a flat 1-level navigation method, which is not what I am looking for.

What I am looking for is this: an open source solution that create somethign similar to a directory (aka "nested" categories) except that instead of ending up with links to web site and their descriptions like in directories, you end up with a page containing the article. Is there an open source solution that offers this functionality?

If not, then perhaps I'll try to see Mambo and figure out if the its mambots would allow me to get around the absense of "nested" categories (or multi-level deep navigation).

[Nutter]

What about Etomite? Using the right snippets you should be able to do what you're after.

- Ryan

[davec]

If the find the lack of levels restrictive in Mambo (I've certainly found that with some sites) perhaps take a look at typo3, or even phpWCMS. I've only been using typo3 for about 6 months but it is hugely powerful, unlimited levels and a whole lot more. It was quite a steep learning curve initially (compared to other open source CMS like mambo *nuke etc) but I feel well worth every minute spent now.

Hope this helps
d

[shafaki]

thanks a lot for telling me about Etomite, it sounded interesting, but they have discontintued the project now.

Thanks a lot davec, i'll check out both and see, it seems I might finally be finding what I'm looking for and what is keeping me from sleeping.

[Nutter]

Etomite was discontinued for a while, but two of the users have picked it up from the original author so it's still being worked on.