Building Category Menus with Wayfinder for Fixed Ecommerce Markup

Wayfinder becomes much more useful once you stop treating it as a simple sitemap helper and start using it as a layout adapter. The donor case came from an ecommerce template that expected a very specific nested menu structure with expandable headers, child rows, and deeper subcategory lists.

That is a common real-world requirement: the HTML already exists, the frontend interactions already exist, and the CMS menu layer has to match them cleanly.

Why this pattern matters

• Top-level categories may need different markup from child links.
• Expandable headers often need their own template branch.
• Nested list depth has to follow the design system, not a default snippet output.

The practical answer is to split the rendering across dedicated Wayfinder templates such as categoryFoldersTpl, outerTpl, innerTpl, and row templates for different levels.

That makes Wayfinder a much better fit for storefront navigation and large category trees where markup quality matters as much as link correctness.