Plone possesses several ways of organizing navigation on the site. These are:

1. Navigation Tabs
2. Breadcrumbs
3. Navigation Tree (left portlet)

1. Navigation Tabs

Navigation Tabs can be organized automatically basing on the folders that exist in the root of your Plone site.

In Site Setup -> Navigation Settings: tick a box Automatically generate tabs and all the published folders that are there in the root will be displayed in Navigation tabs (like in a picture above).

If you remove that tick only one tab Home will be there:

You can customize navigation tabs the way you want. There is a possibility to add, remove tabs, change their order, but to fulfil any of these tasks you have to install a Quintagroup's product - Plone tabs to the site.

2. Breadcrumbs

Breadcrumbs - are little lines, that also show where you are on site. Sometimes it's the easiest way to see where you are (if navigation tree is done so that it doesn't display all the levels).

3. Navigation Tree

Navigation tree can be configured at:

• Plone 2.x - Site Setup -> Navigation Settings,
  
• Plone 3.0.x - Site Setup -> Navigation and Manage Portlets -> Navigation Portlet.
  

Navigation tree displays different content types of different workflow states that are on site. You can select those content types that should be shown in the navigation tree (Displayed content types) and of what workflow state (Filter on workflow state).

Besides, you can give a title to the navigaiton portlet. It is called Navigation by default, but you can enter your own title in the corresponding box:

Navigation tree can display all the documents that are on site. If you want only the contents of the current folder to be displayed in the navigation tree - tick the box.

There are two sections in Navigation Settings (Plone 2.x) / Navigation Portlet (Plone 3.0.x) that are responsible for navigation tree look. These are:

• Navigation tree start level (SL)
  
  

• Navigation tree depth (TD)
  

Navigation settings allows you to make different combinations of what navigation tree displays: whether these are all folders or just those, of the exact level.

Example

Imagine we have a usual Plone site that  consists of several folders and subfolders. The structure of the site looks approximately like this:

Home

News

Events

Folder1Level1

• Folder1 Level2
• Folder1 Level3
• Folder2 Level3
• Folder2 Level2
• Folder3 Level3
• Folder4 Level3

Folder2Level1

Let's discuss several possible variants of Navigation on this Plone site.

• All the folders of all higher levels are displayed (SL=0, TD=0):
  
  

If you don't want folders of higher levels are displayed when you are inside one of them, increase Start Level number to what you need. The higher this number is, the less amount of levels are shown.:

• SL=1, TD=0:
  
  

• SL=2, TD=0:
  
  

You can also control the tree depth: the bigger number you put the bigger amount of levels will be displayed beginning with the highest one:

• SL=0, TD=1,2:
  
  

• SL=0, TD=3:
  
  

• SL=0, TD=4: