Managing and creating new menus in Drupal 6 is a much easier process than in previous versions of Drupal. You can create menus for various purposes. They can be drop down (or suckerfish) menus. They can be menus for primary and secondary links. You can even use a menu to quickly populate links in a blogroll or list of sites that you like to visit.
The menu system is standard in Drupal and you only have to make sure that if you want to manage the menus that your user has the right permissions to manage menus. You can see how to add items to a menu when you add page content from Drupal here (step 4) or when you use Windows Live Writer here (step 5). However, if you want to manage your menus from the menu admin, this tutorial is for you.
We have some tips at the end of this tutorial for more experienced users.
Here are the instructions:
Adding and Editing Menus
- When you first install your instance of Drupal, you should only have three menus (unless you have installed a module that installs a menu for you). Those menus are Navigation, Primary Links and Secondary Links. You’ll need to go to your menu admin page to see your various menus (www.example.com/admin/build/menu). The example we are going to use is from my personal blog at www.MasterTheBusiness.com.
You will notice a few options. You can click to manage the various menus, you can add menus or you can change settings.
- Let’s first click on “Add Menu.” (If you don’t want to add a new menu, you can simply click on the menu to edit in step 1 and skip to step 3). This add menu tab lets us create a new menu that we can add items into. Simply complete the form as per the instructions.
- After you have clicked on save, you will be taken directly to the menu to start adding items. If you had clicked on any menu in step 1 above, this would be the same screen you land on. You can drag and drop your menus, turn them on and off or edit them here.
An important note about the expanded option. If would like the menu to show the items under it all the time, you’ll want to be sure to click on expanded. If you are using the Suckerfish Region for Drop Down menus in our themes, you’ll need to have the expanded button selected to be able to hover over a menu and have the items underneath appear
- If you would like to add a new menu item, simply click on the add item tab at the top of your menu page. You can have the path be any location… can be a location in your site (you should make it a path without the domain name before (e.g. use path/goes/here instead of www.example.com/path/goes/here) or you can make it a path to an outside site.
- Once you have added and configured all your menu items, you may need to make it visible. If the menu isn’t already visible, go to the next section in this tutorial.
Making Your Menu Visible
- When creating a new menu, it automatically creates a new block for you. If you go to your block admin page (www.example.com/admin/build/block), you should find a new block with the menu name. From www.MasterTheBusiness.com you can see my links menus are here. Note that they will be turned off by default (not appearing in any region) so just scroll down the page until you find them.
Whatever you named your menu when creating it is how it will appear in this list. You can move it to any block location you want by either dragging it to the right region or using the pull down menu and moving to the region.
- You can click on the configuration link to the side of the menu block to change visibility settings or change the name that is visible to the visitors of your site.
- Remember, when adding a menu to the suckerfish region in themes that we build, you’ll need to make sure that the menu items are expanded so that the hover over feature works properly.
Menus Setup
- You may find that you need to do some basic setup on your menus. In the first section above (Adding and Editing Menus – Step 1) you can click on the settings tab to open some general settings.
- Notice above that you have three options.
+Default Menu for Content: This is the menu that will appear when adding new content. You can go here (step 4) to see how this works.
+Source for the primary links. When sites have additional links other than main navigation, they will often be located either at the top of the page or in the footer. Very often the primary links will be located in the top of your site. Your theme will have this location pre-defined.
+Source for the secondary links. Like with primary links, when sites have additional links other than main navigation, they will often be located either at the top of the page or in the footer. Very often the secondary links will be located in the top of your site below your primary links or in the footer. Your theme will have this location pre-defined.
Notes and Tips
+When we build sites for our clients, we will use the Navigation menu for anything in the simple menu (the gray menu at the top of our admin pages). It allows us to keep admin navigation separate from the site navigation. You’ll need the simple menu module to make this work this way.
+When we provide a drop down menu (suckerfish menu) for clients we will put that in the site menu. Most of the main navigation on sites we build are in the site menu.
+If you want to create a blogroll or a list of links like have been done at www.MasterTheBusiness.com you can create a new menu and only put items in the root of the menu. At www.MasterTheBusiness.com the Links and Corey on the Web menus in the right sidebar are examples of how these would look.
+When using the suckerfish region on themes we create for your drop down menus, make sure that the menu items are expanded so that they will hover over properly.
