External URLs for Sections/Subsections – Metro Publisher Community & Support Site

NOTE: The "External URL" field on your Metro Publisher edit pages is for sections and subsections. That field is there in case you want a navigation element to send readers somewhere else, i.e. your homepage, a Topics page, a Pages page, a location search, an event search, or even another website. You should NOT use the Redirect Tool for those purposes.

Overview

Sometimes you may want to have your section/subsection navigation point to a different page. For example, you may want to have a subsection point to your homepage, a topic page, a static page, or a location/event search page.

To do this:

Log in as an Admin.
Go to the Edit Page for the section you want point elsewhere.
In the External URL field, put in the destination web address or relative path.

Samples

Add a Home button to your navigation with this URL:

/

Sample topic URL:

/topics/topic-name/

Sample location search URL:

/search/location/restaurant-search-title/

Linking to a Location Search

Log in as an Editor.
Copy the Relative URL from the Location Search page.
Log in as Admin.
Go to Sections and create your new Section or Subsection, and name it after the search you just created.
The URL name and Relative URL fields on your new section will auto-fill in accordance with the Section/Subsection name. You can leave that as is so that if you ever change the External URL again (see 6.), your Section will still have a URL.
Paste the Relative URL that you copied from the Location Search into the External URL field: Example: "/search/location/location-search-name/"

With that Relative URL, you can link from Sprockets and Content directly.

NOTE: Should you wish to display your Locations alphabetically on the initial page load, you can do so by linking to your Location/Listings Search with the following path instead of the default:

http://www.yourdomain.com/search/location/name-of-your-location-search/#letter_filter=all&ord=alpha

Linking to an event search

Log in as an Editor.
Copy the Relative URL from the Event Search page.
Log in as Admin.
Go to Sections and create your new Section or Subsection, and name it after the search you just created.
The URL name and Relative URL fields on your new section will auto-fill in accordance with the Section/Subsection name. You can leave that as is so that if you ever change the External URL again (see 6.), your Section will still have a URL.
Paste the Relative URL that you copied from the Event Search into the External URL field: Example: "/search/event/event-search-name/"

NOTE: With that Relative URL, you can link from Sprockets and Content directly.

Linking to Topics Pages

By default, the Tag URL will be the same as the Tag title, but in all lower case with a dash separating each word. It is possible to change the URL, so you should check the the Tag admin to be sure. To link to a Topics Page, paste a path following this convention:

Example: yoursite.com/topics/title-of-tag/

Linking to an Pages page

To display a Pages page on (as) a section or subsection:

Go to the edit page for one of your Pages via Editor > Pages.
Copy the Relative URL (in our example below it is: /health-environment/advertise/).
Go to the edit page of the section or subsection you assigned your Pages page to and paste this relative URL into the External URL field there.
Click Save.