Introduction
+A great time-saving feature of HydePHP is the automatic navigation menu and documentation sidebar generation. +Hyde is designed to automatically configure these menus for you based on the content you have in your project.
+There are two types of navigation menus in Hyde:
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+
- +Primary Navigation Menu: This is the main navigation menu that appears on most pages of your site. +
- +Documentation Sidebar: This is a sidebar that appears on documentation pages and contains links to other documentation pages. +
HydePHP automatically generates all of these menus for you based on the content of your project, +and does its best to automatically configure them in the way that you most likely want them to be.
+Of course, this won't always be perfect, so thankfully Hyde makes it a breeze to customize these menus to your liking. +Keep on reading to learn how! To learn even more about the sidebars, visit the Documentation Pages documentation.
+Quick primer on the internals
+It may be beneficial to understand the internal workings of the navigation menus to take full advantage of the options.
+In short, both navigation menu types extend the same class (meaning they share the same base code), this means that the way +they are configured are very similar, making the documentation here applicable to both types of menus.
+See the Digging Deeper section of this page if you want the full scoop on the internals!
+What to customize?
+Here is a quick overview of what you might want to customize in your navigation menus:
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+
- Navigation menu item labels - the text that appears in the menu links +
- Navigation menu item priority - control the order in which the links appear +
- Navigation menu item visibility - control if pages may show up in the menus +
- Navigation menu item grouping - group pages together in dropdowns +
Digging deeper into the internals
+While not required to know, you may find it interesting to learn more about how the navigation is handled internally. +The best way to learn about this is to look at the source code, so here is a high-level overview with details on where to look in the source code.
+The main navigation menu is the NavigationMenu class, and the documentation sidebar is the DocumentationSidebar class.
+Both extend the same BaseNavigationMenu class:
use Hyde\Framework\Features\Navigation\NavigationMenu;
+use Hyde\Framework\Features\Navigation\DocumentationSidebar;
+use \Hyde\Framework\Features\Navigation\BaseNavigationMenu;
+Within the BaseNavigationMenu class, you will find the main logic for how the menus are generated,
+while the child implementations contain the extra logic tailored for their specific use cases.
All the navigation menus store the menu items in their $items array containing instances of the NavItem class.
The NavItem class is a simple class that contains the label and URL of the menu item and is used to represent each item in the menu.
+Dropdowns are represented by DropdownNavItem instances, which extend the NavItem class and contain an array of additional NavItem instances.
use Hyde\Framework\Features\Navigation\NavItem;
+use Hyde\Framework\Features\Navigation\DropdownNavItem;
+