MagentoEE CMS Hierarchy Menu in Header

Question

Using Magento EE, I have created a CMS Hierarchy (Admin > CMS > Pages > Manage Hierarchy). Each of the hierarchy items are set to Show in Navigation Menu > Yes under Page Navigation Menu Options. I would like to use this page hierarchy as a separate navigation menu in my header (as a super header navigation of sorts). The hierarchy must be its own separate menu, not part of the categories top menu.

In my local.xml layout, I have added a hierarchy menu block to my header, where I will be calling the hierarchy_menu template from:

<layout>
    <default>
        ...
        <reference name="header">
            <block type="enterprise_cms/hierarchy_menu" name="hierarchy_menu" template="cms/hierarchy/menu.phtml" />
        </reference>
        ...
    </default>
</layout>

In my page/html/header.phtml template, I am echoing the block:

<?php echo $this->getChildHtml('hierarchy_menu') ?>

My issue is that the hierarchy menu block is rendering on CMS pages ONLY. On non-CMS pages, this block either halts the rendering of the rest of the page or simply does not render the menu. I can't seem to figure out why this is occurring. I would like to be able to render the cms/hierarchy/menu.phtml block in the site header on every page.

Does anyone know what is happening here?

Answer 1

The menu is rendered using either the defined cms hierarchy node or falls back to the one found in the registry.

You can check the Enterprise_Cms_Block_Hierarchy_Menu file. The logic for selecting a node can be found in the _construct method.

    if ($this->getNodeId()) {
        $this->_node = Mage::getModel('enterprise_cms/hierarchy_node')
            ->load($this->getNodeId());
    } else {
        $this->_node = Mage::registry('current_cms_hierarchy_node');
    }

Upon rendering the cms/hierarchy/menu.phtml file. The getTree() method is executed. This method uses the $this->_node value, which is not defined on a non-cms page. Hence the page halts during rendering.

If you want to display this menu on all the pages you need to extend the _construct method of this block to always fall back to the top nodeId in the hierarchy. Or to a pre-defined ID (via a configuration item for example) when the node you want to use is not the top node in the full hierarchy of cms pages.