Contents
- Domma CMS User Manual
- 1. Using the CMS
- 2. Tutorials
- 3. Components
- 4. API Reference
- 5. Tools
Navigation
Updated by Darryl Waterhouse on 29 September 2026 · 4 min read
The site's navigation is made of menus, edited at Content > Menus. A menu is a list of links; a location (a slot) is where one is shown. Each menu is a file in config/menus/, and the slot map is config/menu-locations.json. Pages have no "show in navigation" switch - a page appears in the navbar when a menu links to it.
Locations
| Slot | Where it shows |
|---|---|
navbar | The public site's top bar (or side rail, when the menu is vertical). |
footer-primary, footer-legal | The two footer link rows. |
overlay | Floating panels pinned to a corner or edge of the page. Several menus can share it. |
admin-sidebar | This admin's own sidebar. |
Plugins can add slots of their own. Pick the menu for each slot under Menu locations. A menu that a location uses cannot be deleted until it is taken out.
Editing a menu
- Items - click an item to edit its label, link, icon, badge, look and who sees it. Drag the grip to move an item: a line shows where it will land, and an outline round a row means it will go inside that row (the navbar shows nested items as a dropdown, the admin sidebar as a folder inside a folder). Press Esc while dragging to cancel. On a touch screen, drag by the grip too. Right-click an item for add, move, indent, duplicate, hide and remove. Separators and spacers are items too.
- Behaviour - colour scheme, sticky, fixed, static or floating, horizontal or vertical, alignment, and the hover and current-page highlight. A single item can override the highlight in its own editor.
- Binding - let this menu take a slot over on some pages only (a project's pages, or pages matching a pattern such as
/shop/*) while the menu mapped under Menu locations shows everywhere else. The most specific match wins. - Meta - the menu's id, which is its file name and what
[menu slug="..."]names.
Links
Use a site path (/about) for your own pages or a full https:// address for another site. An item with no link and sub-items is a heading. When you rename a page in the page editor, every menu link to it follows it to the new address.
Who sees an item
Each item can be limited to roles, using the same ladder as page visibility: "Member and above", or "Member only" (=member). Items a visitor may not see are left out of the page on the server. See Users & Roles.
Menus inside pages
Place any menu in a page with [menu slug="legal" /], or show whatever a slot holds with [menu location="footer-primary" /]. See Shortcodes.
The admin sidebar
The admin-sidebar menu is this sidebar. In the Menus editor you can move Tools between folders, rename them, hide them or add links of your own. Dashboard, Menus, Users and My Profile can be moved but never hidden, so you can always get back from a bad edit.
Folders can hold folders. The built-in Tools come in a Core group inside Tools; move a Tool out of it, or move the whole group, and your arrangement is kept. A group that nothing of yours has been saved into is not stored - it is made again when the sidebar draws, and a user who may use none of its Tools does not see it. Back to its default place on a Tool puts it back in its group. Each folder remembers whether you left it open or closed on its own, so closing Tools > Core does not close a project that is also called Core.
Arrange the sidebar in place
You can also rearrange the sidebar without leaving the page you are on. Click the six-dot button at the top of the sidebar, beside the site name, to turn on Arrange. The sidebar then lists every item as a row, including hidden ones (dimmed and struck through), and clicking a row no longer opens it.
- Move - drag a row. A line shows where it will land.
- Put inside a folder - drop it on the middle of another row; an outline shows it going in. Dropping on the line just under a folder puts it at the top of that folder.
- Hide or show - the eye at the end of a row. A padlock means the item can be moved but not hidden.
- Keyboard - with a row focused, Alt+Up and Alt+Down move it, Alt+Right puts it inside the row above, Alt+Left takes it out of its folder.
- Done saves and redraws the sidebar. Cancel or Esc leaves it as it was, asking first if you moved anything.
Arrange changes the same admin-sidebar menu as the Menus editor, so it changes the sidebar for everyone; each person still sees only what their role allows. Renaming items, changing icons, badges or who can see an item, and adding links is done in the Menus editor. The button is shown to users who may edit menus.
Right-click menus on public pages are a separate feature: Content > Context Menus.