Drupal UX debt: Lovell menu, breadcrumbs, and links

[Dottisea]

User story

As a Lovell editor, I would like the sidebar menu to represent accurately the hierarchy of the content, rather than having items in the "Lovell Federal health care" take a VA link and breadcrumb structure.

Screenshot of problem

Acceptance Criteria

• [ ] The sidebar menu accurately represents the hierarchy of the content
• [ ] Menu item links for items in the "Lovell Federal health care" section go to a page with a corresponding URL.
• [ ] Breadcrumbs on the pages in the "Lovell Federal health care" section represent that section, rather than VA or TRICARE.
• [ ] A link to "Lovell Federal Health Care" in a breadcrumb item goes to an appropriate system page (TBD: what we mean by "appropriate")

Background information

Steve Wirt wrote in Slack:

1. It might be helpful to editors to surface the url to federal pages as separate from VA. It would mean that each node that is supposed to be in both would end up with three aliases instead of two. ( a relatively light lift that might reduce editorial confusion for why a page with a VA url is present in their TRICARE menu) 2) we need to Make sure every node has been saved by hand so that the alias manipulation properly kicks in (it does not fire on bulk save, bulk alias update, bulk publish)

[omahane]

I have already done a first pass at this to make sure that all the "Lovell Federal health care" items have the proper URL on Prod. I have tracked this work on a Google Sheet.

[omahane]

@ryguyk, @JayDarnell and I discussed this issue again while going over the Lovell menu in the Drupal CMS. We all agree that there is a UX problem with the sidebar menu. We think it would make more sense to use a "Lovell Federal health care" url alias when that is the content's section. What's not clear is where breadcrumb links of the "Lovell Federal health care" should go. We are also not clear how much this UX debt is an issue for editors. We also discussed how because this content is on the va.gov website, that the decision to make VA the default link and breadcrumb is justified. It's also confusing, especially when you don't know the following about Lovell content on Drupal:

• If it's TRICARE, it get a TRICARE link
• If it's VA, it gets a VA link
• If it's Lovell Federal, it gets a VA llink*

*There are exceptions to this:

• Stories
• New releases
• Events

[mmiddaugh]

Updated 10/2023 (CMS Content Model Documentation)

NEW: For nodes that are not in any menu: AP recently changed this logic. Now, nodes in no menu are handled via a Drupal module, Easy Breadcrumb, which makes breadcrumbs available in the JSON:API.

Two modules were added to the CMS

• Easy Breadcrumb does the handling for nodes with no menu. It has all the settings for breadcrumb generation at the link provided. Because the primary vehicle for populating breadcrumbs, the menu_breadcrumbs module, is not configured for all content types the easy_breadcrumb module has been added. The easy_breadcrumb module fills in the gap left by menu_breadcrumbs by populating breadcrumbs based on path for content types without breadcrumb data.
• Computed Breadcrumb is the other module we added. It doesn't have any configurable settings, but it takes the breadcrumbs generated for any node (whether easy breadcrumb or menu-managed) and shoves them into a hidden field. That field data is what shows up in JSON:API