Navigation: Display the templates in which a navigation is used

[scruffian]

What problem does this address?

It would be useful to know which templates a navigation block is used in, so I can know whether its safe to delete it.

What is your proposed solution?

When in Navigation Focus Mode, we could display the template it is used in, in the sidebar:

This is similar to #20476

[annezazu]

This has come up in the FSE Outreach Program in various ways and would be a huge help when it comes to the general navigation experience!

[getdave]

@scruffian @draganescu Any ideas for technical implementation of this feature?

I'm thinking probably the only way is to set post meta on the Nav Post via REST which indicates which templates it's used within.

On a practical level:

• user inserts Nav block into template
• Navigation Menu X is set as a ref.
• REST request sent to update wp_navigation post meta with the slug of the Template.
• if Nav Menu is changed then the same request is sent to update (remove and add).

Questions:

• What did I miss?
• What edge cases are there?
• What other solutions should/could we consider?

[scruffian]

That's not going to work for templates that are manually edited. Could we consider getting all templates and parsing them for navigation blocks? The performance would be the main issue.

Do we also care about which posts the navigation is used in? I'm thinking we do.

[draganescu]

Outside of a solution that is a mapping stored and managed it's all reverting to scrubbing posts for block markup which is a no go. I think Dave's take with post meta is a good way or maybe even leveraging the options table and storing the mapping there for all navigation block <-> post relationships.

[scruffian]

all reverting to scrubbing posts for block markup which is a no go

why?

[draganescu]

all reverting to scrubbing posts for block markup which is a no go

why?

Because it is extremely slow. Every edit of templates will have to check what happened to the navigation block, evey open navigation block will call a query that is looking for LIKE stuff. It's just a bad design, for tens of thousands of items in the posts table ...

Plus there is no upside compared to storing a map in options. It's more complicated to do right :)

[scruffian]

We would only need to make the query when the user is asking where their navigation is used, not every time an edit was made.

[draganescu]

Of crouse, but it's still weird query to make. As I said, there is no upside to storing a map in options which is simple to implement and fast to access.