Concept: navigation areas and breadcrumb areas

Navigation areas are special ASI-developed controls used in master pages that create automated lists of navigation links. All ASI-developed master pages are designed to support the four default navigation areas and the breadcrumb area shown in the following diagram, but you can define up to 30 navigation areas in the system and add the corresponding elements to support those navigation areas to any master page.

The breadcrumb area appears automatically on every site, but you must specify exactly which navigation areas to enable globally for use by the navigation items in the website's sitemap. The four default navigation areas provided with CM are shown in the following diagram.

When a navigation area is globally enabled in the definition for a CM website, a checkbox representing that navigation area becomes available for selection when you are defining navigation items in the sitemap for the website. Whether a particular navigation item actually appears in one of the enabled navigation areas of the website is determined by the specific navigation area checkboxes you select for that navigation item when you are defining it.

All master pages fully support the breadcrumb area and all four of the default navigation areas. However, if you modify the definition of any of the default navigation areas in CM, you might need to revise the master pages to support the changes that you have made.

To integrate your own hand-built master pages with CM, if you plan to use the breadcrumb area and navigation areas available to CM websites, you must ensure that you add the appropriate elements to your master page to support them. Similarly, if you define additional navigation areas in CM, you must modify your master pages to support these additional navigation areas.

Note: The controls that display the Logon/Logoff link and the icon that toggles Surf-to-Edit mode, both of which appear by default at the right of the Auxiliary navigation area, are not a part of the Auxiliary navigation area, so they are unaffected if you remove or move the location of this navigation area.