Building a Large Multi-Level Menu with Wayfinder and DocLister

Large nested menus are one of the places where Evolution CMS templates can become either elegant or painfully repetitive. One common approach was to let Wayfinder build the top level and then use DocLister inside the row template to render deeper blocks.

The pattern worked, but it came at a cost: more queries, more template indirection, and more maintenance complexity as the tree grew. The original comparison eventually pointed to a cleaner alternative: DLBuildMenu.

That mattered because the measured difference was not academic. The combined Wayfinder + DocLister approach produced a noticeably heavier query count and slower total render time than the dedicated DocLister menu builder.

The lesson is still useful today. Mixing tools can be fine for small menus, but once the structure becomes deep, repeated, and performance-sensitive, a purpose-built menu generator is usually easier to maintain and easier to optimize.