This is a general question about menu structure. I need to split a very long menu (biographical articles in a category) into 2 or more sub-menus. There are currently 18 articles but there will be more in the coming months. The problem is that I don't want to change the URL path by adding an extra step in the path, which is the only way I can see to do it. The only reason I need to split the articles into 2 or more dropdowns from the main menu is because of how many there are. Unfortunately they don't really lend themselves to further sub-categories, other than alphabetical.
I could put thumbnail previews on a blog index page, but I would like to give the user the ability to navigate directly to an article from the Home page via the menu, if possible. If I split the menu into 2 sub-menus (Category > Articles1 and Articles2), I have to use a sub-category that then becomes part of the URL (instead of sitedotcom/category/articletitle).
I'm using T3 framework, t3_bs3_blank template in Joomla 3.8.7.
Is there a way to do this without changing the structure of the site in that area? Perhaps I could change that one menu dropdown into a wide format that lists the articles in columns? But I can't figure out how to do that using that template. Alternatively, is there a way to divide the articles into balanced sub-menus without adding another step to their URL path? In other words, to avoid /category/dropdown1/article1 and /category/dropdown2/article2, and instead have 2 dropdowns but the URLs still read as /category/article1 and category/article2. Adding an extra step would be difficult, since adding more articles later might mean I'd have to change some articles from one sub-dropdown to the other, thus changing the URL again.
I hope this makes sense. Many thanks in advance for help with this.
