Check Out Quickmenu for possibilities

The difference between Quickmenu and Jump is that Quickmenu does not support vocabularies. At least on Drupal 5. I see you refer to D6, so might be worth checking.
I tried Quickmenu, then switched to Jump because I needed a jump menu populated by a vocabulary.

@Als: I've done just what you say with Quickmenu, it just involves one more step: Just install taxonomy_menu module as well. That will generate the menu itself which you can easily then designate as a quickmenu.

The difference is that Quickmenu doesn't actually try to generate any menus (which is good, in my opinion)...it simply converts any existing menu into a 'quickmenu'. This approach makes more sense to me because it means it can work with ANY menu, no matter how that menu is initially generated.

@Rob_Feature: I think another difference is that Quickmenu does'nt create a dropdown list.

@ginkgo what do you mean by a drop down list? Quickmenu creates a simple drop-down style menu from any menu that's enabled. Can you clarify?

I'm interested in this module for a flexibility that I do not see in the Quickmenu module unless Quickmenu has capabilities that I don't know about (I haven't tried either module).

The problem I have with the current menu system is that I find it inflexible with its capabilities to express or set the the path for a menu. I'm talking the administration menu system at admin/build/menu or administer >> Site building >> menu. I haven't been able to find any way to use tokens or similar for the path of the menu. If you create a page using the Views module that requires parameters that will change depending on situation/user etc, how can you add these parameters with the current menu system without a module like Jump?

Yes, if you program a full module you can use hook_menu and then use a % in the path specification but I would much prefer not to have to create a module just to be able to specify a path for the menu items. The little bit of php I would use here is a lot better than writing a full module.

Another example I have is that I want to create new node types (either using CCK or extended with CCK) and have these available to users. The author of each node created from the node type is intimately related to their nodes, and so would want to have menu items to both access and edit them but other users either wouldn't have access or if they did have access wouldn't want menu items for every one of these. Each author could have created none or several such nodes so we need some php in the menu to work out how many menu items and which menu items to display. Other users with access would simply get to them via links. If they had to be on every user's menu with thousands of users you could end up with many thousands of such nodes and that could create many thousands of menu items.

Another problem occurs where you create a node type but you only want each user to be able to create one node of this type. For example, an 'About me' type page. In this case the user starts off having a menu item to be able to create their node. Once they have created their node they only have menu items to view and edit their node but no longer have a menu item to create the node.

I don't see quickmenu solving these problems but I do see Jump being used to solve this type of problem.

If anybody can tell me how to solve all these type of problems without using Jump, then I would like to hear. I've been trying to figure out how to do some of the above for some time and it feels like I have missed something very fundamental with Drupal.

Continuing my comments further, the examples given for this Jump menu show a menu item created with the specification of:

'tracker/'. $user->uid => t('My Posts'),

Would quickmenu be able to create that menu item?

How would you create that menu item without Jump?

As a clarification: Quickmenu doesn't CREATE any menus at all. It's job is to simply display a menu in a particular style (a dropdown style menu). To use quickmenu, you simply go into the menu system and enable ANY existing menu to be a quickmenu. Then it appears in the blocks list so you can place it wherever you want.

In my opinion, that's good separation of display vs. functionality (which is good web practice). Quickmenu is a display module...it's up to functionality modules to create the actual menu. Once it's created you can make it a quickmenu with a single click.

I took your advice Rob, I'm currently using Jump, but for me the best thing is that Jump automatically creates a ton of blocks for each menu severely cluttering my block admin page, and Quickmenu just creates the blocks you require. However the Quickmenu project (6.1.3) is currently not compatible with 6.8 drupal. I've posted an issue there to see when they'll change that but at this moment its not possible for me to implement.

Hopefully they'll do an update soon :)

I just posted a patch to get Quickmenu working in Drupal 6.8. Find it at: http://drupal.org/node/359253#comment-1202234