Dynamic Menu generation using webservices

Question

I have a website which generates the navigation menus based on the user access levels. The code uses webservices & xslt to get the data and transform it in the browser.

Now I want to export this site to a freely available CMS, Can anyone suggest a CMS in which this functionality is built-in. I really liked Orchard but am Unable to get this to work.

Thank you all for your time and the suggestions.

Answer 1

I guess you won't find any CMS that would have something like this built-in and wouldn't involve some coding to make it work.

It would be fairly easy to add such functionality in Orchard, though. The only two things you'd have to do would be:

1. Create an Orchard module (which can be autogenerated via command-line)
2. Create a class in your module project that implements INavigationProvider interface. There is only a single method to override that returns the menu items collection (properly hierarchized via Parent <-> Items properties). All the custom item-retrieval logic should happen right here. There is also a MenuName property to override - this should return the name of a generated menu (can be pretty much anything).

And basically that is all - compile the solution and enable your module feature via Dashboard -> Modules -> Features.

To display the menu you could use the Advanced Menu module. After installing and enabling this feature you can drop the MenuWidget (or StyledMenuWidget if you want a simple, pre-styled menu) to any Zone you want (you can do it from Dashboard -> Widgets). When doing that you'd be asked for the name of the menu to render. Provide the name your INavigationProvider's MenuName property returns.

HTH