Develop Navigation without Making Pages Public (yet)

LiveWhale
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I’m developing a new set of pages that will have their own navigation. It’s a faculty handbook, and I want each section to be a new page with a persistent navigation from one page to the next.

This is a work-in-progress, so we aren’t ready to make these pages public yet. But there seems to be no way to create a visible navigation in this scenario. Pages that are hidden and/or not visible to “everyone” don’t show in navigations. But to change those settings would cause these pages to be included in the XML sitemap, and thus be found by search engines before we are ready.

Would it work to use one of these options from Sitemaps and robots.txt - LiveWhale Support?

  • Anything in a folder that starts with /_ (e.g., /_sample/index.php)
  • Any page that contains “.test.” in the filename (e.g., index**.test.**php)
  • Any page that contains “/test/“ in the filepath (e.g., /admissions**/test/**open-house/index.php)

Any of those would require me to rename the folder or the files during development and then change it when ready to publish. But at least then I could make the pages live and visible to everyone, in order for the navigation to work, without them getting found by search engines.

Right? Is that the only/best way to accomplish this?

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Hi Jon,

Ah yes, this does come up from time to time. Checking with the team, currently the best approach we can suggest is to use the LiveWhale CMS Toolbox > File Browser > navigate to your faculty handbook directory, then use the sidebar link “Password protect this directory.”

This allows you to add an .htaccess username/pass for the whole handbook directory. Doing so will prevent unapproved users from seeing or stumbling upon those pages, and also prevent them from getting crawled or indexed. (Of course, it’s minorly annoying to have the browser password prompt pop up, but you could do something very easy for all your editors and reviewers to share. And once you type it in once, browsers tend to remember it for all sub-pages.)

If you were to put /test/ or .test. into the URL string, that would work to exclude it from the sitemap, but they could still end up being crawled.

1 Like
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That’s a great idea that I hadn’t considered. Appreciate the response.