We’ve rolled out significant updates to the ckanext-menu extension, focused on making portal navigation more stable for administrators and more flexible for designers.
Beyond hard-coded links
In the past, managing website menus in CKAN often required a trade-off between technical rigidity and manual effort. If you wanted a multi-level dropdown menu, you often had to hard-code HTML into your theme, making even small link changes a task for the development team.
The latest updates to ckanext-menu will treat your site’s navigation as structured data rather than just static text.
What’s new for our community?
Developed with the evolving needs of Link Digital customers in mind, these updates focus on three key areas:
- Hierarchies: We’ve refined the internal logic that handles ’parent-child’ relationships. Whether you are nesting a ‘Climate Data’ sub-menu under a ‘Regional Reports’ tab, the hierarchy remains stable and predictable, ensuring users never hit a dead-end or a broken link.
- Design freedom: The extension can now output your menu as a structured list. For our design-conscious users, this means your navigation can finally be ‘style-agnostic.’ Whether it’s a sidebar, a footer, or a mobile-first ‘hamburger’ menu, the data flows perfectly into any custom interface without being tied to a specific HTML format.
- Customisation: the menu can also be updated directly through the UI making it easy to maintain portals without requiring developer intervention or configuration file edits.
Why this matters for your portal
As a site administrator, you can now restructure your portal’s navigation to highlight seasonal data or new initiatives without worrying about breaking the site’s layout.
For the end-user, it results in a seamless, professional browsing experience that feels cohesive across every page.
By moving toward a more logical, data-driven menu structure, we are ensuring that CKAN portals remain modern, accessible, and most importantly, easy to explore.
Note: This article was co-authored by Yan Rudenko, CKAN expert at Link Digital.
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