Menu items that are not links
Problem
The Menu system in Drupal 5 lets admins define an arbitrary number of menu items in a hierarchy, each of which is a link to somewhere in the site (or on another site). That's great, unless you want to have a menu tree that has items in it which are not, in fact, links. For that, the following code lets us designate "menu links" that will not actually link anywhere.
Step 1
We will define the magic value <none> to mean "a path to nowhere", just like <front> means "the home page". The crucial part here is the theme_menu_item_link() function, which we will override. Place the following function in your template.php file.
<?php
function phptemplate_menu_item_link($item, $link_item) {
if ($item['path'] == '<none>') {
$attributes['title'] = $link['description'];
return '<span'. drupal_attributes($attributes) .'>'. $item['title'] .'</span>';
}
else {
return l($item['title'], $link_item['path'], !empty($item['description']) ? array('title' => $item['description']) : array(), isset($item['query']) ? $item['query'] : NULL);
}
}
?>Any menu item whose path is <none> will now become a span rather than a link. Note that because it's not a link you can't click on it, so you can't access sub-menu items unless the no-link menu item has the "Expand" checkbox checked so that its children are always visible. If you need to have access to the sub-menu items for things like dropdown/flyout menus, try using the JavaScript version of this snippet.
This method can also be used as a separator. Simply have a menu item with text "------" or similar, and set its path to <none>. It will then show as text with no link, providing a nice separation of the menu.
Step 2
As a nice extra, we can also add additional help text to the menu item edit page. For that you will need to implement a very small module that implements form_alter. The module itself doesn't need anything more than the following code snippet:
<?php
function example_form_alter($form_id, &$form) {
if ('menu_edit_item_form' == $form_id) {
$form['path']['#description'] .= ' ' . t('Enter %none to have a menu item that generates no link.', array('%none' => '<none>'));
}
}
?>That will modify just the menu item edit form and add additional text to the description (the text that appears below the textfield) describing how to use the <none>.