Navigation Issues - Browse Page

pelzmann

I'm really enjoying the new design. My site transferred smoothly and I haven't experienced any major problems until this evening when I was uploading images to several new galleries.

After the upload, I used the browse menu option to navigate.
NO FOLDERS WERE FOUND ! What a shock!
Fortunately everything was still viewable in Organize, so it does not appear that any images were lost.

I started my migration using the Pixie template.
Pixie used Select From: "Current Location" to populate the folders.
Now I can only get all Folders to appear with Select From: "Top Level Folders".
But clicking on any folder does not navigate to the lower level folder.
The screen only refreshes, and I go nowhere.

So, what trick am I missing in the customization options? :scratch
My old copy of Pixie works fine, but I don't want to revert to that and lose all of my other changes.
And, how did this happen while I was only in the Organize and Upload mode ? :scratch:scratch

My site: www.pelzmann.smugmug.com

SmugMeg

Hi pelzmann,

I have a short answer and a really long answer for you If you want the quick solution, go to Customize > Customize Site. Click on "All Folders" at the top of the sidebar. Hover over the Folders block and click the little wrench icon to edit. Change the "Select From" option to "Current Location" and press Done. Do the same for the Galleries block. Publish the changes and you should now be able to navigate your site.

If the logic behind that change doesn't make a ton of sense to you at the moment, let me explain how the new SmugMug works in terms of how navigation, organization, and customization all come together. Bear with me because I'm going to go into excruciating detail

In the old SmugMug, the way that you had your categories (now called folders) and galleries organized was also how they appeared to your viewers (unless you changed it with some complicated coding). So by default your folders or galleries would appear on your homepage. The way that everything appeared organized to your viewers was identical to the file structure that existed behind-the-scenes.

Now, in new SmugMug, the customization tools are so powerful that they allow you to differentiate how things appear to your viewers, as compared to how things are organized behind-the-scenes (as seen in the Organizer). For example, you could have 10 main public folders on your site, but only display 5 of them on your homepage. Or you could have separate pages to show your Weddings folders, your Family folders, etc. It's all up to you. But…with power, comes responsibility This means it's also possible to customize things so that the navigation doesn't make sense, or so that folders or galleries don't show up where you might want them to.

I hope that makes sense so far. Now, the reasoning behind solving your specific problem.

Your /browse page, as well as your homepage, behaves like the "root", or top level, of your site. If you go to organizer and look at the tree view that appears on the left-hand side, everything that appears in the level directly below your username is contained in that top level.

By default, we populate the browse page with a Folders block and a Galleries block. Blocks like this can be customized to affect which folders and galleries they show. Also by default, the Folders and Galleries blocks both show folders and galleries, respectively, that live on the "current location". In essence, they will show the content that shows within the organizer, for that same location. If on the top level, they will show the top level folders and galleries. Left at the default settings, this should allow your visitors to browse through your site via the browse page, in the same way that the content is organized within the organizer.

When you go in to customize the browse page, look on the top of the sidebar where it highlights "All Folders" under the different sections of your site. This means that any changes you make will affect every folder that someone navigates into. By setting your Folders block to show "Top Level Folders", every folder page will only show these top level folders, instead of the folders that it actually contains (as seen via the organizer). Notice how when you try to navigate to a lower level folder, although the screen refreshes and it looks the same -- it does actually take you to that lower level, as seen via the URL. For example, I click on your Colorado folder and I am taken to pelzmann.smugmug.com/Colorado, even though the content appears the same.

So, by resetting the Folders and Galleries blocks to "current location" as I described in the first paragraph, they will dynamically update based on which page a visitor is viewing, thereby allowing someone to navigate through the site.

I'm not sure how this originally happened or why you got the "no folders found" message initially. I can only think that perhaps you were on a folder that contained only galleries, and then you went into the customizer from there. In that case, the Folders block would say "no folders found" because there weren't any folders on that particular page, only galleries.

I know it's a lot to take in, but I hope this information makes sense and helps! Let me know if it's not clear or if you have any questions. Your photos are stunning by the way!

Megan

pelzmann

Megan, thanks so much for the clear and detailed description.

I followed your instructions and used select from "Current Location" in BOTH the Folders and Gallery blocks.

My Gallery block was set up to choose 3 specific galleries. I'm guessing when I made this change, it broke the navigation because it applied to ALL ???

FYI - the Folders block was set to "Top Level Folders" because "Current Location" resulted in "no folders found".

Allen

I guess the apple didn't hit me in the head. I don't have a clue what all this means.

kaneohebud

I'm with you Allen. I followed the instructions and still show no galleries in the Folders from the "Browse" function.

jhelms

Same here. I made the change in the 'all folders' page but the 'all galleries' pages only has a breadcrumb section showing up above the 'gallery content' block (which is, I think what I want, I just want the breadcrumb to show on my gallery pages with the typical gallery images in the gallery content block).

phaserbeam

This is really confusing all the time... the "All folders" section should contain either a "Folders, Galleries and Pages" content block or a "Folders" and a separate "Galleries" content block. Set both to "Select from: Current location".
The "All Galleries" section just exists to let you customize the galleries itself, for example to add some CSS code or some extra text or design elements to all gallery pages.

Once you remove "Galleries" from the "All Folders" section you will miss the galleries when using "Browse".

P.S. I did that mistake myself by removing "Galleries" from "All folders" and i also changed "Select from: Current location" to "Top level". If you know what you are doing it's ok to edit that, but IMHO it's best to leave that on defaults.
The only thing i changed was to remove "Pages" from "All folders" since i created quicklicks on the top menu to open those custom pages.