UserUID in path (and fixing my account menu and other locked menus) [#31210]

As seen in http://drupal.org/node/29000 and other similar questions,
the only way to move or disable 'my account' is currently to disable the entire Navigation block, and build one from scratch.

Additionally, items with a userid # in the path are impossible to build with the current menu system.
This means you have no way to easily add items like "Edit my profile", "Show my subscriptions", etc.
Any item with a user# requires a hack of building php code into a new menu block, and due to the inability to disable 'my account', either having menu items in 2 places (confusing), or doing the above and disabling the Navigation block, and building it manually.

Proposed solution(s):

1) Allow disabling all items, including 'my account'. Warn before allowing it, but allow it.

2) Allow 'my account' to have child menus (not currently possible - not editable, locked)
"Edit my profile" should be a valid choice under "my account".
Massmailer's 'list subscriptions' (path=massmailer - note NO UID in path)
belongs under 'my account' for sure, but cannot be added there now.

3) Add userid wildcard to path

A userid wildcard (say # for the sake of discussion, since # is not a good character to use in a URL anyway) would allow doing all sorts of things like "Edit my profile" = path "user/#/edit"

The path code would have to add an expansion function, to allow this to work, and likely tools like pathauto and other aliasing code would have to be smarter, but could deal with # code easily (and allow MUCH smarter aliasing, such as 'alias user/#/edit to useredit/#' or simply even 'user/#/edit to editme' (adding the # automatically with a new flag in the alias code)

Comments

Comment #1

sethcohn commented 25 September 2005 at 00:09

http://drupal.org/node/32128
raises another reason to add this:

The current workaround to "do something" (move, rename, add, parent, etc) with 'my account' is to tell the wannabee admin to create a new menu block to do it.

The Navigation block has a special property though: it's title is the user name. You can't easily make a block titled with the username. This requested feature would allow that, hopefully.

Comment #2

ShaiHulud commented 6 December 2005 at 09:40

I can't see why there hasn't been a follow up on this?
With regard to the upcoming 4.7 release this feature would be very much appreciated. It has been requested several times already, and I cannot imagine it to be very hard to implement.

Comment #3

Richard Archer commented 6 December 2005 at 10:29

I actually looked at this request just the other night.

There are several separate issues rolled into one here:

Allow the my account menu item to be moved and deleted.
This request seems reasonable. Please post a patch if this is important to you :)

Allow userid in paths.
This can be done already. A module can add a menu with a path like 'user/'. $user->uid .'/something' and it appears as a submenu of my account. Allowing some magic token to be replaced with the userid in admin-created paths requires a patch to the url() function. This function can be called upwards of 100 times per page view so performance in url() is critical. A patch to that function which performs a search/replace on every path is not going to be accepted into core.

Allowing the navigation menu to be renamed.
There's another issue for this. http://drupal.org/node/8515

Allowing another menu to be created containing the username.
I'm sure this could be done with some combination of blocks and phptemplate. In any case, there's already one menu block with that title... wouldn't another one be really confusing?