Primary Link active Trail

There are loads of posts about this but they can take a while to wade through. One for example: http://drupal.org/node/140491.

The problem is that http://api.drupal.org/api/function/menu_primary_links/5 and callees and theme('links', ...) [check your page.tpl.php] never call theme('menu_item', ...). Rather, theme('menu_item_link', ...) gets called. (Don't forget that the layout of primary/secondary links is rather different from the tree-like layout of the Navigation menu or other menus when put in a block.)

Rather than try and "get this right" themeing-wise I usually just do a simple string substitution, e.g. directly in page.tpl.php:
print str_replace('-active"', '-active active-trail"', theme('links', $primary_links, array('class' => 'primary-links')))

The -active gets added to items in the trail by http://api.drupal.org/api/function/menu_primary_links/5.

Update: also the Theme developer module might be very useful to you: http://drupal.org/project/devel (highlights which theme functions/templates are used to generate any output of interest).

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

Oh joy, even the vaguely useful -active class suffix has been removed in D6, and the page describing how to fix the active trail in D6 has been unpublished!!!

>references you have given me so far are Drupal 5
Erm yes, whooops, well spotted!

For now, this link works, whether the content is any good is another matter ... actually maybe that's why the page is currently not available on d.o. ... http://66.102.9.104/search?q=cache:yPNb0HgyeK4J:drupal.org/node/216763+d...

[rant] Really this should be bog standard in core default stuff ... [/rant]

gpk
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www.alexoria.co.uk

As I stared out of the kitchen window meditating on the mix of superb themeing features and basic themeability omissions in D6, it occurred to me that part of the problem is that as implemented primary and secondary links don't do tree-structured menus at all well, perhaps because that is not what they were originally designed to do.

However the Nav menu does it all very nicely, including an "active-trail" class.

So perhaps the trick is to filch code from the core Nav menu block. We would need
- a call to get the top level menu items of a desired menu (the primary links) but no children
- another call to get the children of the currently active (or in active trail) top level menu, but none of their children (I'm sure the functions that return menu structures can have a flag set to control whether or not you get the kids).

Then use the same themeing functions as used in the Nav menu block.

Finally, squirt this all into page.tpl.php somehow.

Probably not too hard once you've found the right functions to use ... I think the place to look first would be user.module, in function user_block() with $delta == 1.

[Update]
I was too hasty. The Nav block is just http://api.drupal.org/api/function/menu_tree/6. http://api.drupal.org/api/function/menu_tree_output/6 (which is really a themeing function) looks promising, but to use the output from http://api.drupal.org/api/function/menu_tree_page_data/6 you'd need to strip the relevant parts out of the returned array. Might still be the easiest way.

Or have a play with the theme developer module ... might highlight a theme function that you can re-implement to do a check to see if each menu item is in the return value of http://api.drupal.org/api/function/menu_get_active_trail/6.

gpk
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www.alexoria.co.uk

I played around with that 5.x mod to function l (common.inc) that I liked so much, and in my brief testing I seem to have active primary and secondary links based on path working...

I took this mod - http://drupal.org/node/60737#comment-126546 - and made what I thought were the logical adjustments to the code. My new function l in common.inc (Drupal 6.2) is below.

There are 2 inserts... each is preambled by a commented (Added next x lines for active...)

function l($text, $path, $options = array()) {
 // Added next 2 lines for active path trail - 1 of 2 inserts based on http://drupal.org/node/60737#comment-126546
  $active_url = check_url(url($_GET['q']));
  $link_url = check_url(url($path, $options));

 // Merge in defaults.
  $options += array(
      'attributes' => array(),
      'html' => FALSE,
    );

  // Append active class.
  if ($path == $_GET['q'] || ($path == '<front>' && drupal_is_front_page())) {
    if (isset($options['attributes']['class'])) {
      $options['attributes']['class'] .= ' active';
    }
    else {
      $options['attributes']['class'] = 'active';
    }
 } 
  // Added next 8 lines for active path trail - 2 of 2 inserts based on http://drupal.org/node/60737#comment-126546
    else if (strpos( $active_url, $link_url) === 0 ) {
    if (isset($options['attributes']['class'])) {
      $options['attributes']['class'] .= ' active';
    }
    else {
      $options['attributes']['class'] = 'active';
    }
 }

  // Remove all HTML and PHP tags from a tooltip. For best performance, we act only
  // if a quick strpos() pre-check gave a suspicion (because strip_tags() is expensive).
  if (isset($options['attributes']['title']) && strpos($options['attributes']['title'], '<') !== FALSE) {
    $options['attributes']['title'] = strip_tags($options['attributes']['title']);
  }

  return '<a href="'. check_url(url($path, $options)) .'"'. drupal_attributes($options['attributes']) .'>'. ($options['html'] ? $text : check_plain($text)) .'</a>';
}

Feedback is welcomed. If I see anything break, I'll be sure to report back.

5.x modules need to be updated before they work with 6.x. Sometimes this is trivial; other times more significant changes are needed.

Menu Trails is not listed here http://groups.drupal.org/node/5036 and there doesn't seem to be a 6.x version of the module in the offing as yet http://drupal.org/project/issues/menutrails. Suggest you open a new issue for the project requesting info on when a 6.x version might be available http://drupal.org/node/add/project-issue/menutrails.

In the meantime the methods described above may be adequate for you, depending on your requirement.

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk

Hmm an 'active-trail' class should be present by default even for primary links, since 6.3. However it's not entirely consistent with the way this is done in other menus: http://drupal.org/node/249571#comment-941281.

gpk
----
www.alexoria.co.uk