Menus

A few helpful facts about menus in Drupal Gardens:

• Menus are sets of links to various URLs on your site, displayed as horizontal or vertical lists.
• Menu display and visibility
  • Menus generate blocks - You can control their display on your site on the Blocks page at Structure > Blocks:
    • Pages - display/hide only on certain, specific pages
    • Content types - display/hide on pages of given content types
    • Roles - control menu visibility by user role
    • Users - allow users to control display of any given menu
  • Menus follow permissions - Any menu item that links to something a given user does not have permissions to visit (based on user-roles and -permissions) will not be displayed to that user.
• Menus control breadcrumbs - Menus are part of your site's navigation system and determine the breadcrumb path displayed on any given page.
• Menu items can have sub-items - A menu item, "About me" might have sub-items like "Family", "Community", and "Work".
  • Sub-items can be displayed two ways in Drupal Gardens, as dynamic drop-downs or as an indented sub list, depending on the region in which your menu is displayed. See Menu sub-item display for details.

• Links in the main menu at the top of every page can help orient visitors wherever they are on your site.
• You can include a reduced or minimal menu of your most important links at the bottom of every page by configuring and placing a menu in a footer region.
• If your site has extensive books or other sub-sections, it can help to configure a navigation menu for that content to appear on the relevant pages in a sidebar region.
• Any simple view - When creating dynamic, filtered lists of content, you assign them a path (e.g. "clients", "articles", "simpleview"). You can add a menu link to any such path on your site. For more information, see the simple view help page.
• "Blog" - Your main, aggregated blog page is included in the main site navigation as "Blog" and is located at the URL /blog (http://example.com/blog). For more information, see the Blog help page.
• Individual blogs - If you have more than one blogger on your site, each blog post will include a link to that author's individual blog page at the URL /blog/[UID] (UID is the User ID number). You can also add this URL to a menu item. As a site administrator, you can find any user's UID by navigating to their profile page and clicking the "Edit" link. The URL of the profile edit page is formatted as /user/[UID]/edit. For more information, see the Blog help page.

You can add a menu link for content while you are editing or creating it.

1. "Provide a menu link" - Select this checkbox to create a menu item for the content you are creating or editing. To remove a menu item for content, simply deselect the "Provide a menu link" checkbox and save it.
2. Menu link title - This text will be the menu item.
3. Description - This text will appear as a tool tip in most browsers when visitors hover over the menu item.
4. Parent item - Select which menu the new menu item should appear in and, optionally, whether it should be the "child" of another menu item. Menus are designated by <angle brackets> in the drop down. Individual menu items appear under the menu header with multiple hyphens ("--") to indicate their position in the menu's heirarchy.
   • See below for more information about enabling child link display in menus for child links in the main menu.
   • Menus can be configured on the Menus page at Structure > Menus, including drag-and-drop rearrangement and resorting of menu items and parent-child relationships.
   • Menus generate blocks. These blocks can and enabled and positioned on the Block page at Structure > Blocks on your site. See the Blocks help page for more information.
5. Weight - By default, menu items are sorted and displayed alphabetically. Giving them relative "weights" allows you to sort them as you need. For more information on weighted sorting, see the weight glossary entry.

There are times when you need to create a menu item that doesn't link to a specific piece of content, but rather to a dynamic page, such as a blog page or simple view, or simply to some other URL on your site.

1. Go to the Menus page at Structure > Menus
2. Click "add link" for the menu to which you want to add a link.
3. Define the menu item - adding a link to a URL is identical to adding one for content as shown above except for two differences:
   • Path - You can use any of the following formats to define the link for your menu item:
     • internal links: node/1234, user/1234, simpleview, contact, blog, etc. - Add these links without a slash at the beginning: "myviewpath" not "/myviewpath".
     • external links: http://example.com/content
     • <front> links to the default front page of your site
   • Show as expanded - If your menu item has sub items (i.e. it is a "parent" to other menu items that are its "children"), "show as expanded" has the following effect:
     • If your menu is placed in any region except the one called "Navigation", the menu will be displayed as a vertical list and the children will be displayed as an indented sub list below their parents.
     • If your menu is placed in the "Navigation" region, the parent item will appear in the menu with a small triangle next to it and when site visitors hover over it, its children will be displayed in a drop down.

1. When you are creating or editing content, select "Provide a menu link", add a title and description as needed, select an item from one of your menus to be its parent and save your content.

   

   Alternately, you can drag and drop items in a menu to rearrange them - both their display order and their parent-child relationship.

   

2. Hover over the menu block's gear symbol and select "Edit menu".

   

3. Click the parent item's "edit" link.

   

4. Select the "Show as expanded" checkbox then click "Save".

   

The "expanded" menu item, as described above, will now display in one of two ways, as a drop-down or as an expanded sub-list, depending on which region you place it in:

• In the "Navigation" region (where the Main menu block is located by default), the parent item will appear in the menu with a small triangle next to it and when site visitors hover over it, its children will be displayed in a drop down. Note that any of the Drupal 7 system menus or even a custom menu will display child items in a drop down if it is placed in the navigation region:

  

• In any other region (sidebars, etc.), the menu will be displayed as a vertical list and the children will be displayed as an indented sub list below their parents: