Manu/Navigation helper functions

[RobA]

(I' really like a standard way of caching all of the menu data as an XML file to get into the core rather than various plugins all doing variations of the same things, such as the i18n, the multilevel menu plugin, the pagecache plugin, etc.)

In this case all meta data (including additional fields included by e.g. the Custom Field plugin) of the pages must be included in the cache, i.e. everything but the content.
if everything is accessible in an array indexed by slug, whose values are arrays with the meta data (values indexed by the names), this would be really useful.

Off the top of my head I'd prefer a simplexml file/variable rather than a flat array, set up something like this:

Code:

<pages>
  <page attributes (hidden, etc.)>
      <title>This is the Title</title>
.
.
.
      <customfield1>whatever</customfield1>
      <subpages>
        <page attributes (hidden, menu order, etc)>
...
        </page>
      </subpages>
  </page>
</pages>

So every page has a set of children that are the fields of the page, and a <subpage> child that can recursively hold more pages.

I'd also like to see the page nodes arranged as per the menu-order parameters. so it would be ewasy to get a next/previous page from the structure.

-Rob A>