Menus

With a menu, you provide links to navigate your site. Examples are the internal links to your home-page, contact-form or blog, or an external link to your personal website. A couple of menus (Navigation, Primary links and Secondary links) are standard available after installing Drupal, but it's very easy to define your own menus. Some menu's are added by modules you install.

One or more menus are displayed automatically on certain spots depending on the theme you use, but since each menu generates its own block, these blocks can be shown anywhere.

The module that generates and organises menus (Administer>>Site building>>Modules, Menu is under core-optional) can be disabled but is enabled by default. One permission (Administer>>User management>>Permissions) has to be set: Administer menu under the menu module. The menus themselves will only display choices that can be made by certain users. If only authenticated users can create content for example, then the menu-item wil only be seen by those users.

Most of the menu-administration is done on the Menu-page (Administer>>Site building>>Menus)

The Menu-page

List menus

On this page you manage your existing menus. Without adding any menu you have the choice between Navigation menu, Primary links and Secondary links.

The navigation menu will be displayed only after log-in (the user log-in will then disappear). Standard, it will provide log-out and My account. Administer and Create content is available for administrators.

The primary and secondary links are empty to start with. There is no real difference between those menus, only the spot where a theme shows them.

Changing a menu

Click on one of the menus, and you're able to change, add, enable (make it visible) or expand (show the submenu) an item, or to change the menu.

Add menu

On this page you add a menu. Adding a menu will create automatically a block for that menu, that you have to administer on the block-page (Administer>>Site building>>Blocks) in order to show that block.

Settings

Here you determine the general default settings for the menu's. These default settings can be overruled whenever you create or edit content.

Menu settings on a content-page

Whenever you create or edit content, you're able to change the menu-settings on that content-page.

If you leave the menu-title blank, the content won't be added to a menu

By choosing a parent-item, you choose what menu displays a link to the content and under what submenu.

Weight is a way to choose in what place the link is displayed in a menu. The weight can be changed later by drag- and drop under List in the Menu-page.

Some extra modules for Menus

• Nice Menus: Enables drop-down/right/left expandable menus.
• Administration Menu: The module renders all administrative menu items below 'administer' in a clean, attractive and purely CSS-based menu at the top of your website. It also creates a block for the administration menu.

Go back to 'Building a Drupal site'