Every CM website has a corresponding sitemap, in which you define a hierarchy of navigation items. Each navigation item defines the behavior of a single link to a web page of some sort, which can be:
■ A content record located anywhere in the Content Designer content folder hierarchy. At run time on the website, IIS actually serves up the rendered .aspx version of the most recently Published version of that content record.
■ An ASI-developed dynamic web page that is available for use on all CM websites. Some of these pages provide standard website functionality such as a dynamic Sitemap page, while others provide specific features from the Public view of iMIS.
■ A manually coded .aspx or .html file located anywhere in the IIS Physical Path associated with the IIS application that is used for hosting CM websites.
■ A page located on an external website completely outside of the CM environment.
You can nest navigations items inside of other navigation items, creating a hierarchical structure. The structure that you create for the sitemap hierarchy is very important for two reasons:
■ This is what the system dynamically renders as the structure of a Sitemap page on CM websites.
■ The position of a navigation item in the hierarchy (the root node is level 0 of the hierarchy) determines whether that navigation item is automatically displayed in the various navigation areas of website pages. This automated display can be suppressed on a per-navigation item basis, and you can force a navigation item to be displayed in specific navigation areas even if it would not normally be displayed there by the automated display handling specified in the definition of each navigation area.
The specific ASI-developed control used in the website's master page for the rendering of each navigation area also affects whether navigation items are rendered in the various navigation areas. For more information, refer to Defining navigation areas and breadcrumb areas.
The website's sitemap is automatically created when you define a new CM website, and is given the same name as the website. Currently, CM supports one sitemap per website. You cannot delete or change the name of a sitemap. Instead, you define sitemaps by adding and removing navigation items, rearranging navigation items in the sitemap hierarchy, and changing the definition of individual navigation items.
Note: In content records, you can also hard-code links to other content records or external content by using ContentReference and ContentLink iParts, but unlike navigation items, these hard-coded links cannot be dynamically displayed or hidden by the system. Instead, they are static links that are always visible in rendered pages.