Main nav items sharing child pages in Liferay 6.1?

Question

FYI, I'm new to Liferay so please have patience with me!

Here's the scenario:
I have a main nav menu working in my navigation.vm. I've determined that two of the main nav items would share the same child menu listing the same pages.

I've gone into the GUI and created the child pages but must I create the same set of pages twice for both nav items which share the child pages or is there some method by which I can create these child pages once and then share them between the pages and just bring in different data?

So to restate:
Can I have two nav items share one sub-menu with the same child pages and just bring in unique data to each of the child pages based on the main nav item selected?

If this isn't clear, let me know and I will try to explain better.

Answer 1

Here is what I understand:

• You have created two pages - Page-1 and Page-2.

• You need child-pages to be shared for these pages, like:

   Page-1    Page-2
    __|__      __|__
   |     |    |     |
   cp1  cp2  cp1   cp2
  

• Where cp1 & cp2 are child-pages 1 & 2.

• Based on which child-pages the portlets are added, they should show different data.

Here is my take on this:

Since content on the set of child-pages is different, I would suggest creating two set of child-pages with the same name i.e. to say cp1 of Page-1 is not equal to cp1 of Page-2.

This would let you simplify management and also if you decide later that the layout of the child-pages should be completely different from each-other or to have completely different set of portlets then it would be easier since anyways they would be different pages instead of being shared.

Hope I have answered your question and it would help.