One of the most important pieces of making a working site is to define your navigation items. This allows the theme to inform the SideNav component as well as the next/previous components at the bottom of each page.

Yaml data

Unfortunately, genenerating left nav contents purely from the pages directory has some fatal flaws. It makes it very difficult to establish the order of items or to hide items all together. In

src/data/nav-items.yaml

, you’ll list your nav items in order.

- title: Menu
  pages:
    - title: Page 1
      path: /menu/Page-1
    - title: Page 2
      path: /menu/Page-2
- title: Single Page
  pages:
    - path: /single-page
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Some important things to note here:

You only need to link to the first tab if using page tabs
The
```
title
```
refers to the menu and item text, it’s allowed to have spaces
The
```
path
```
refer to the relative path to the mdx file in your pages
You can make a
```
Page/index.mdx
```
file if you’d prefer to have assets in a folder. The path would still just look like
```
/Page
```

Adding a divider

You can insert a divider below any top-level nav item by adding the

hasDivider: true

property to it’s configuration under

src/data/nav-items.yaml

. Note: dividers can only be use with top-level nav items and are incompatible with the header navigation style.

When shadowed, the

ResourceLinks

component can optionally receive an

includeDividerSpace

prop. Set this to false if you want to remove the margin above and below the

ResourceLinks

divider.

- title: Menu
  pages:
    - title: Page 1
      path: /menu/Page-1
    - title: Page 2
      path: /menu/Page-2
  hasDivider: true
- title: Single Page
  pages:
    - path: /single-page
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In the example above, a divider will appear between Menu and Single Page.

Customizing

The nav item list can be customized using Gatsby theme shadowing. Simply provide your own implementation of

/src/util/NavItems.js

which can augment or replace the nav items read from

src/data/nav-items.yaml

// /src/util/NavItems.js
import { useNavItems as themeUseNavItems } from 'gatsby-theme-carbon/src/util/NavItems';

// add nav items
export function useNavItems() {
  const navItems = themeUseNavItems();
  return navItems.concat({
    title: 'Additional Nav Item',
    pages: [
      { path: '/page1', title: 'New Page 1' },
      { path: '/page2', title: 'New Page 2' },
    ],
  });
}
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