Menu Editor

Drupal 7: There is a discussion about a Drupal 7 version with a proposed battle plan (recently changed). Volunteers are welcome.

Menu Editor enhances the menu editing form with inline text fields for title, path and description, and provides placeholders for new items.

This way, it reduces the number of page visits needed to create a site's menu structure, and eliminates the need for dummy nodes.

News

The multicrud module contains an experimental implementation of a multicrud-powered menu editor. You are invited to test it and give feedback.

Features in 6.x-2.x

Inline text fields for title, path and description: In each row you get inline text fields for title and link path. This means, you don't need to go to a new page any more to edit the title or destination of a menu item!

Tabindex: The tab index is modified to skip the annoying checkbox fields ("Enabled", "Expanded", "Delete").

Placeholder items for new content: You can create menu items for yet non-existing content. Instead of a useless dummy link path, you write "<new page>" or "<new webform>" or "<new panel>" or "<new [content type]>", which is internally stored as "node/add/[content type]/mlid/[mlid]". If you visit that link, you get a node creation form that will make the menu item point to the newly created node. Alternatively, you can use <new> as a general purpose "under construction" placeholder. This allows to quickly plan a site structure with the client, without creating dummy nodes.

Hook for your own placeholders: The placeholders are defined via an implementation of hook_menu_editor_placeholders(). The definition of this hook might change in the future, to allow more flexible placeholder schemes.

Permissions: menu_editor introduces one new permission per menu, which gives access to the respective menu_editor page (and nothing more). Users with the "administer menu" permission don't need this extra checkbox, they can always edit all menus (since 6.x-2.0-rc2, I think).

Shortcuts in the admin menu: The module adds one item to the admin menu for each of your menus, found at
Site building > Menus > List menus > [menu name]
This does not work in the admin_menu-6.x-3.x series (yet).

In addition, if you go to
Site building > Menus > List menus
and click one of the menus for "list items", you get one additional tab called "Power Edit". Which, again, takes you to the form shown in the screenshot.

Path autocomplete: See #666644: Path Autocomplete for Menu Editor. Similar to mpac.

Performance / memory (6.x-2.0-dev): Replaced the weight dropdowns with text fields, similar to Tiny menu editor. The page will still be quite heavy with all the different input fields, but less than it would be if each row has a dropdown with 50 options.

Installation

Download and enable like any other module. Don't forget to enable the sub-modules, to get the complete feature set.

Experimental 3.x, planned 4.x

Note: The features of 3.x are not interesting enough for me to invest any more development time. The next time I invest into this module, it will be for 4.x.

The 3.x branch can sync menu updates into a taxonomy vocabulary, and into a nodereference, that will reflect the structure of the menu. A new placeholder <term> creates terms on the fly.

Aside of that, we get some restructuring in the API.

4.x will probably use multicrud, to get rid of the 8 blanks limit, for csv import/export with client-side parsing, and for some other fanciness.

Tips

Narrow layouts? It was pointed out that the menu editor form does not fit in narrow layout columns. Solution: Use the Region Visibility module to hide the sidebars in the admin area. Or better, get an admin theme.

Very long menus? Some menus have many items. Many. Such as the menu of the drupal.org documentation pages. This will make the usual menu editing page unmanageable, but it will be even worse for the form provided by this module. Solution: Use the normal menu edit form, if that works better.

Administration menu 6.x-3.x? The new 3.x branch of admin_menu is very nice, but it makes it more difficult to programmatically add menu items. Thus, the menu_editor related links are missing in admin_menu-3.x. Luckily there is an alternative, DQX AdminMenu.

Downloads