A quick and clear menu for Drupal

Wed, 08/15/2007 - 16:32 — Alan

The starting menu structure in Drupal is great, but convoluted. I found that if I was the administrator, then it difficult to see where the standard navigation entries were for non-admin visitors because they were intermingled with the administration entries. There's actually a quicky way of separating them.

1) rename the current menu to Admin Menu

2) Create a new menu called Navigation (or whatever you want) - from now on this will be the main navigation for the site.

3) Enter a very basic structure into the Navigation menu

4) Go to Administer Blocks and add Navigation menu so it shows where you want it to. In my case, I made sure that the Navigation Block is lighter than the Admin block. After all, if you're an Administrator, you should know where to look.

5) Change the properties of the Admin menu block so that only administrators can see it

6) Refine the Navigation menu entries.

The beauty of this is that we start the non-admin menu from scratch and only put in there what the users will want to see, rather than having to disable a whole lot of admin menu entries (or set them up for admin only). You could go further and have a separate menu per profile. What I'd probably do is have 3 menus, all adding to the one before, i.e.:

- Navigation menu (for anonymous, non-registered, non-admin visitors)

- User menu (for registered users, this would add extra functionality missing from the Navigation menu)

- Admin menu (for administrators, adding functionality missing from Navigation and User menu)

If you have a user hiearchy, then it makes it a lot easier to manage the menus that way.