Support for Mega Dropdown Menus

The patch above apparently doesn't create the new files properly. I'll re-roll it tomorrow. It will apply cleanly if you touch the 3 files it needs, first.

Fixed.

@MJH: Thanks for the feedback. Extra node_load() calls are definitely a performance concern. My hope was that this could be handled by one of Drupal's more generalized caching solutions like block caching, but I have been struggling with this. Even after hacking nice_menus_block() to enable caching, and even though the block is actually being stored in the cache_block table, it's still reaching the node_load() on every request.

It seems like this will eventually come down to implementing a caching mechanism specific to this module. I'd like to have this existing code made official in some manner before taking that on, so I'm hoping to have a nice_menus maintainer weigh in here soon ;)

Patch ported to D7.

Recently discovered that if you delete a mega dropdown node that is still referenced by a menu item, this happens: #1277376: EntityMalformedException: Missing bundle property on entity of type node. in entity_extract_ids() (line 7390

This updated patch adds caching for the dropdowns' content, fixes the EntityMalformedException that results from deleting a dropdown node, and includes some minor cleanup.

Updated patch; fixes a PHP notice.

Reroll for latest 7.x-2.x-dev

@klonos, sorry, I'm not sure what's being suggested in #13. As far as I can tell, superfish support for mega dropdowns just means the dropdown is a div instead of a ul element, which seems to make sense - it might address the issue I identified in the summary involving unordered lists in the dropdown, but I'm still going through their examples. Is that what you were getting at?

klonos,

I appreciate the feedback.

Given that this patch is for 7.x-2.x, I don't think we can use superfish's mega dropdown structure. That's because we do not have a new enough version of superfish, we can't upgrade superfish because it requires a version of JQuery later than the one shipped with D7, and the maintainers have decided against introducing Libraries API and JQuery Update dependencies into 7.x-2.x.

users need to also know some basic html/css in order to theme this to fit their site's design.

Yes, they do. The same can be said of Nice Menus. I'm very open to CSS changes that would improve the initial installation and setup experience, provided it doesn't harm extensibility via theming.

I think it would be wise if we reserved the nice_mega_dropdowns as a name for a future solution that provides menu item rearranging via a drag-n-drop UI (similar to TB Mega Menu). We should call this one something like nice_mega_node_dropdowns or nice_mega_node_menus instead.

I still prefer the name as it currently exists in the patch, because "Mega Dropdown" is widely used and recognized as a term for this specific UI pattern. The same cannot be said of "Mega Node Dropdown" or "Mega Node Menu."

we could eventually come up with a UI to define columns and place regular menu items in a way that we render a "true" mega menu with items that can be dragged (a node-less solution).

I don't agree with the implication that the only "true" mega dropdown menu is one that has a drag-and-drop UI, and I remain opposed to any approach that imposes a structure on the content of the dropdown, for the reasons explained in the summary. A "UI to define columns" would necessarily do that.

Changing status because of the unresolved issue with the autocomplete field on the menu edit form.

This updated patch should fix the issue with the autocomplete field on the menu item edit form - it now displays the node title instead of the nid.

Bad testbot, bad!

Reroll for 7.x-3.x branch

@xiukun.zhou

Thanks for committing. Unfortunately, I screwed up the last reroll of the patch by forgetting the new files added. The attached patch includes only the new files, not the changes to nice_menus.module which have already been committed, and it should apply to both the 7.x-2.x and 7.x-3.x branches.