CiviCRM Community Forums (archive)

Hi Nate,

I'm not aware of specific functionality for such a "supporting pages" menu in CiviCRM.  One possible workaround is to build the menu items in structured html within the event description, and then use css (or even jQuery) to style those elements into a menu of links.  Not exactly a turnkey solution, but I think it would be the least invasive way to accomplish the task.  More involved methods would include overriding the registration form template (as explained here: http://wiki.civicrm.org/confluence/display/CRMDOC/Directories) and hard-coding your links there, but then that would give all conferences the same links if you're doing more than one conference.

There are probably other ideas out there, too, of course.  I'm curious to hear what others will suggest.

- Allen

This is another one of those areas where closer alignment with drupal would help tremendously and allow non-developers to achieve basic business goals like linking their CiviCRM event to supporting information on separate pages without editing HTML, understanding tpl files or deeply diving into Drupal voodoo.

Unfortunately, CiviCRM constructs is URLs (civicrm/event/info?reset=1&id=15) in such a way that you can't just create a menu block and make that menu block visible only on the desired event. If it built URLs in a drupal friendly way (civicrm/event/info/15?reset=1), that would be possible (e.g. you could limit the block visibility only to the civicrm/event/info/15 path).

Your method sounds like a lot of work to set up, but seems pretty maintainable. Did you have to hardcode your theme (that themekey switches to when displaying an event) to display the appropriate menu?

Another option is to change the design so the links to related pages show up as a hand coded HTML menu. You would create all the pages, then create the menu element. Each drupal page gets the html menu element as part of the node content & the civicrm event gets it as part of its content. This of course completely eliminates most benefits of using a CMS, but I suspect it would require less work and drupal knowledge than the taxonomy/context approach.

This same approach could be used to add the HTML menu element to the civievent tpl file for that specific event.  If you can edit tpl files and your content doesn't change, I think this would be the easiest and most maintainable solution.

Another option is the good old iframe. This would just encapsulate the event in a node and you could just use normal Drupal techniques to do what you want. This type of thing would be another option for CiviCRM to achieve tighter integration with Drupal... each piece of CMS content... event, contribution page, etc. would be available as a drupal node. Not sure how the code would work, but if you edit a civicrm event "node" you'd be taken to Civi for the editing.

Anyway, these might be some good initial use cases for the 4.0 Architecture discussion.