Introduction to Site Navigation

There isn’t an offi­cial way to man­age nav­i­ga­tion in Craft CMS. Unlike oth­er CMSes that offer built-in nav­i­ga­tion man­age­ment, Craft CMS leaves it up to the devel­op­er to decide the best imple­men­ta­tion for the website. 

Craft CMS is design-agnos­tic and doesn’t impose any lay­out or design struc­ture on a project. Craft focus­es entire­ly on the con­tent and not on the pre­sen­ta­tion. Because Craft doesn’t for­mal­ly sup­port one way to do nav­i­ga­tion, there is a lot of flex­i­bil­i­ty in what you can do.

Recent­ly on the Craft CMS Dis­cord serv­er, there was a dis­cus­sion of how to do nav­i­ga­tion and the input from dif­fer­ent peo­ple sig­nif­i­cant­ly var­ied. You had those that most­ly always imple­ment the nav­i­ga­tion man­u­al­ly via hard-cod­ed nav items right in the Twig tem­plate. But, there were also those that did it half-hard-cod­ed nav­i­ga­tion, adding in some dynam­ic items when nec­es­sary. And then there were oth­ers who chimed in that all nav­i­ga­tion should be ful­ly dynam­ic and man­age­able from the Craft con­trol panel.

There’s no wrong way, just the way that is best for your project. I’ve pri­mar­i­ly used the hard-cod­ed approach for my projects and a mix of every­thing for client or cus­tomer websites.