[Catalyst] [Absolute Beginner] Navigation?

[Ekki Plicht (DF4OR)]

Hi,
I am just getting to learn Catalyst and have to admit that I am a bit lost. I 
have so many questions that I will probably fire off more questions in the 
near future.

Where am I today?
I have read THE BOOK, studied docs on CPAN, played around with DispatchTest 
example from THE BOOK, but nothing more.


Anyway, here goes.
I am contemplating converting a mid-sized, sucessfully operating web shop 
(written in Perl) to Catalyst. Ok, one should never change a running system, 
but I have my reasons.

My first question is - how do you tackle the problem of building a navigation 
tree? We currently have about 260 static pages multiplied by 5 languages, so 
in each language the navig tree is fairly long. 

Currently the nav tree is in 12 top sections (lets call them product groups), 
each of these product groups can have several (up to 25) sub groups, which 
themselves have the selection even further narrowed down, up to 5 levels deep.

I know that I can have zillions of possibilities with the dispatcher to take 
apart the URI and act accordingly, but first my customers must find the 
appropriate section of what they are looking for. So is there a way to get 
back from my dispatcher scheme (which does not exist yet) to a navigation 
tree? Some kind of introspection of the dispatcher which spits out a list of 
handled URIs which I can turn into a nav tree? I know that the debug output of 
the built-in server has something like this, but I am looking for something 
easier accessible.

Or do I have to write that nav tree manually, or better write a tool for that 
purpose? I have tested several CMSs (e.g. Typo3) which start out with 
designing a nav tree and then assigning pages (templates) to the entries in 
the tree. If that's the way to go, ok, just need to know.

Cheers,
Ekki