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By WebDrake on
I've installed Drupal 6.2 on my system — http://webdrake.net/ — and have been busy trying to create a basic set of pages. Some of these are intended to be children of others, so, for example, my neuroscience page should be a child of my science pages.
However, the primary links menu does not expand to display the child. When viewing admin/build/menu-customize/primary-links I have selected both parent and child to expand, but if I click on the 'science' link the 'neuroscience' link does not show up.
Why is this and how can I solve the problem? I have discovered a number of modules such as the NICE menu, but would prefer not to install anything extra if the base Drupal system can provide the functionality I'm looking for. I would also prefer not to alter any code.
Thanks,
— Joe
Comments
Children
I'm not sure but doesn't it depend on your theme? Means children graphics must be available too.
I don't know .... I've tried
I don't know .... I've tried with both the default Garland theme and the Chameleon and Marvin themes, no luck with any.
I don't understand what you mean by 'children graphics', this is just a matter of links, not images. If I understand the menu config right the primary menu should expand to display the child links when a given menu item is clicked on, just as occurs in the Admin menu. Currently this doesn't happen.
I can't even get the situation others have described with earlier Drupal versions, of having the whole menu permanently expanded — the child elements just don't show up in any conditions.
I'm actually new to drupal
I'm actually new to drupal and cms and still stuck at finding out how to display my stories on one page ^^
I just meant that probably for every children link a graphic or a background must be defined. But that seems not to be your prob.
Yes
Yes, it is slightly available in some themes, but not something that's generally needed. I've found Nice Menu's a pretty simple way of getting full functionality from the primary menu's (you'll need to edit the theme files slightly, but it isn't that tough).
To see an example of a 5.x theme that has one layer of expanse in the primary menu's, check out Slash (On that page, Drupal Hosting and Blog Example are submenu's - click on Drupal Themes News to see what it looks like without any sub-menu items).
I am still getting used to 6.x, and my experiences with Nice Menu's were in 5.x, but I don't think it would be that difficult. Just read through the things that you get in the module download (it didn't help me about 6 months ago, but hopefully it has been improved since).
Menu confusion?
I noticed in the 'blocks' section that in fact 'primary links' was not defined to appear anywhere. So, I placed it to appear in the left menu and bingo, an expandable menu, just like the navigation menu, appears.
However, at the top right of the site (in the Garland theme) there are still some 'main' links (see http://webdrake.net/ where at the top right corner, there are some links with little triangle buttons). So how is this menu controlled and its contents defined if it is not the primary links menu?
Well, you can easily disable
Well, you can easily disable the primary menu from defaultly showing up if you prefer it to be in another location of the page. These settings are on the theme configuration pages.
admin/build/themes/settings/global (there's also a specific page for each installed theme to check as well)
Primary menu and theme config
Ahh, thank you! I hadn't known about that particular area of configuration.
What I'd really like is not to disable the primary menu in the theme, but to have it expand to show children. But I don't see a way to make that happen .... ?
AFAIK this is a theme
AFAIK this is a theme implementation thing-- some themes implement it, some don't. For example, Four Seasons and Rooplethemes do.
And as ninja pointed out, if your choosen theme doesn't support it natively, you can use http://drupal.org/project/nice_menus to add it.
I dont use garland much so I'm not sure, but from what you say it seems it doesn't support this natively.
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Thanks
.... to Ninja Overlord and you for some very useful comments.
I discovered the following "Garland Drop Down Menu" theme: http://www.thanhsiang.org/faqing/node/88 which I am now using. It solves the key problem and I will be sure to also check out nice menus.
Back to development again, then .... thanks again for the good advice!