Add a real hierachical menu admin interface to Drupal

This has been fixed everywhere in d6 except node/add/page. It has been suggested that 'Navigation' menu should not appear in this context. Or that node-type configuration should allow an admin to define which menu/s the nodes can be added to (defaulting to primary and secondary menus only).

admin/build/menu-customize/primary-links/add still has ugly 'parent' selector that is a usability bug. there may be other such selectors too

we are still taking usability fixes for D6

There's now a documented variable in core which allows you to override these (and the taxonomy select lists).

And an RTBC patch against D7 implementing parent choosers: http://drupal.org/node/191360 (so I'm marking this as a duplicate of that, see you over there).

Also see drupal.org/project/hierarchical_select - especially version 2, for a possible route with the taxonomy module.

Also, primary links is now the default menu on this form in D6: http://drupal.org/node/199428#new

Which helps a bit.

http://drupal.org/node/199428 doesn't really solve the issue, although it is a minor improvement. For the 'Menu Settings' on node-add/edit to be made usable we need to hugely simplify that fieldset. Most importantly 'Parent item' field. Here's how:

Why would a user be adding a 'Page' node to the 'Navigation' menu? That is an advanced-user task. A regular (newbie) user or non-technical website personnel would only be interested in adding pages to menus that the site visitor can see. Probably the primary, secondary, or other non-default menu.

Considering that, how about add a 'Menus' field (and variable) to the 'Submission form settings' fieldset on admin/content/types/TYPE which has a checkbox for each of the menus. It would look like this by default:

Menus:
[ ] Navigation
[√] Primary links
[√] Secondary links

On a more complex and customized site it might look like this;

Menus:
[√] Navigation
[ ] Primary links
[ ] Secondary links
[ ] Admin menu
[√] User menu
[ ] Taxonomy menu

This variable/setting would act as a filter to the menus and menu items shown in the 'Parent item' field on the node-add/edit forms. And thus make 'parent item' easy to understand and usable. Advanced users can always enable the 'Navigation' menu if they really want to mess with Navigation menu, or go add the page to any menu it in admin/build/menu-customize/navigation if it's a one-off task.

Other improvements here would be to have a good hierarchical selector in core if a hierarchical menu is enabled for the given node type. For example the one demoed 12 seconds into this video: http://blip.tv/file/501136. IMHO Hierarchical Select doesn't seem much more usable than the existing mess. Testing would be needed to quantify this though.

Also 'Parent item' is confusing, unless the menu is hierarchical. In fact the hierarchical term 'Parent' is confusing for users and should be avoided whenever possible (just like 'node' is meaningless to drupal newbies). Unfortunately it's the best term to use for truly hierarchical structures, but drupal uses 'Parent' throughout menu.module language strings -- even when the menu is flat. This could be fairly easily improved in d7.

'Weight' will also be confusing for users who never configured menus or blocks prior to d6, because drag-n-drop now hides 'weight' in most interfaces. We should hide the 'Weight' field if JS is enabled and offer a drag-n-drop interface to set the weight if and once a 'parent item' has been selected. These interfaces could even be integrated.

http://drupal.org/node/191360 largely solves the immediate usability issue, my suggestion would provide further usability enhancements but are less priority once http://drupal.org/node/191360 is committed

This has already been added to Drupal 7.

(Sorry for pinging the participants, I'm trying to clean up a few old issues)