How to create a link in a multi level navigation?

Question

Hi All,
I have a portal with multilevel navigation and I want to add page that acts as a link to an external website lets say http://www.cnn.com.
How can I add a link into the multilevel navigation? Can I create a page that is actually a link?
Thanks

Answer 1

Hmm, there's nothing simple in the WLP framework that will allow this, but you can hack it into your skeleton without too much trouble, I think. I'd try something like this:
1) Create a page in the IDE that will be used to represent this external site in your portal. This page won't have any content on it -- it's basically going to be a placeholder for your menu tab. Make a note of its definition label, though (eg. external_page_1)
2) Assuming you're using a bighorn skeleton, in your abstractmenu.jsp skeleton file, make a change like this (highlighted):
<!-- Inactive page -->
<c:otherwise>
*<c:choose>*
*<c:when test="${pagepc.label == 'external_page_1'}">*
*<a href="http://www.cnn.com">Go To CNN.com</a>*
*</c:when>*
*<c:otherwise>*
<render:pageUrl pageLabel="${pagepc.label}" var="pageUrl"/>
<a href="${pageUrl}">
<c:choose>
<c:when test="${! empty pagepc.inactiveImage}">
<c:if test="${! empty pagepc.rolloverImage}">
<c:set var="imageclass" value="wlp-bighorn-image-nonrollover"/>
<img src="${pagepc.rolloverImage}" alt="${pagepc.title}" title="${pagepc.title}" class="wlp-bighorn-image-rollover"/>
</c:if>
<img src="${pagepc.inactiveImage}" alt="${pagepc.title}" title="${pagepc.title}" class="${imageclass}"/>
<c:remove var="imageclass"/>
</c:when>
<c:otherwise>
<jsp:text>${pagepc.title}</jsp:text>
</c:otherwise>
</c:choose>
</a>
*</c:otherwise>*
*</c:choose>*
</c:otherwise>
What this says is that, when this skeleton file is going to render the menu tab markup for that particular page, spit out a hard link to cnn.com instead.
Give that a try, and let us know how it goes!
George