It is only a year since I looked at Concrete5 for the first time. Earlier I had heard about the ultra simple CMS system, that should be easy to handle by both the developer and the customer, but I never really forced myself to try it out.
But last year I started working at ESVAGT, their website was created in Concrete5 and I needed to change a few lines of code. So I was forced to learn, how to edit blocks and navigating around in the source files of the templates.
Earlier this month I decided that I wanted to learn how to use Concrete5 for real. I decided to start creating my own template.
I have used Bootstrap for several years and had a small website laying at my PC, that I could try converting to a Concrete5 template. It went good and was quite easy when I came to know the different tags. But one thing remained a problem for me. The menu. The AutoNav function in Concrete5 do for some reason have a predefined stylesheet for the menu. So it will either try to make it a nice little burger menu or a standard Bootstrap menu. But what if I already did style my menu at my static HTML site? Well, thats your problem, Concrete says…
But after a couple of Google searches I found a nice little post at the Concrete5 forums.
leinteractive from the forum made a nice little template for the AutoNav module, so that it will output a totally stripped version of the menu with no design at all.
So, if you got a small Bootstrap website, that you would like to be converted to Concrete5, and got problems with your menu having the predefined design, here is a guide to have no design at all in the Concrete5 AutoNav 🙂
The first thing we are going to do, is logging into the base of the Concrete5 installation. This is typically done with an FTP client. I personally use Filezilla at my Windows PC.
Next up we are going to move into the root folder of Concrete5. Here you will find a folder called Blocks. Inside this, you should find a folder called autonav. If not, create it. After that a folder called templates.
The folder structure should now look like this: root > blocks > autonav > templates
It is important that you create the folders in the root of your Concrete5 installation, and not in the Concrete folder inside the root folder. If you create the blocks folders inside this folder nothing will happen.
Inside the folder called templates, create a new PHP file. Call it whatever you want. The name of the file will be shown in the Concrete5 installation. In my example, I called the file navigation_custom.php. This results in “Navigation Custom” in the backend of Concrete5.
Then copy and paste the code from the forum post (found below too) into that file.
Now, open the frontend of the website, add a Autonav block and click it. Choose the tab called “Custom Template”.
Choose the custom template, that you just created.
When done, hit save. Now everything should be great and work properly with Bootstrap.