The menu system
The menu system in Drupal is very powerful. It is used to provide navigation, the main site links as well as administration navigation and secondary site links. You can even create your own menus and put them wherever you want such as in the footer.
There are two regular ways of editing the menu or navigation:
- Via the page edit view under Menu settings
- Through the menu administration: Site building > Menus
Menu settings
When you edit a page there is a Menu settings section. To create a menu item you must enter a Menu link title and select the Parent item which allows you to choose which menu and where your item should appear. The weight allows you to choose in what order items appear relative to items on the same level - the default is alphabetically.
Menu administration
All menu items are available here including those added on the edit page. It gives you a quick way to rearrange menu items as well as disabling them and creating new menus. When you create a new menu a corresponding block is created which you can assign to a region. See .
If you want menu items to appear to certain users then you must ensure that page or url is only accessible those users and the menu system will decide whether it should show a menu item automatically. See .
Primary and secondary links
You may have seen some sites that have a second level of links that change depending on which section you are in. This can be acheived easily with Drupal.
- Go to: Site building > Menus > Settings
- Change Source for secondary links to Primary links
If you don't see you links appearing your probably haven't got any primary links yet so go and add some. There can be differences in how themes handle primary and secondary links. Garland, the default Drupal theme has Primary and Secondary links built into the page which you can turn on and off via the theme settings: Site building > Themes > Configure > Garland. There are also blocks for Primary and Secondary links that work well in sidebars: Site building > Blocks. With automatic secondary links the Secondary links block will no longer display because they are shown together with the Primary links.