My menu block only shows if the current node is a child of the menu. Is this expected behavior? And how can I show the menu no matter what?

Background: I have a Menu Block that is working fine in a Panel variant. The way this works is that pages with a TID get the layout and the Menu Block is in that layout's header region.

My problem occurred when I decided I wanted this menu to appear for 400+ nodes that are test results for reports in this section of the site. I applied the TID to all, and for each, the panel variant appears, but no menu block.

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JohnAlbin’s picture

JohnAlbin
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Location Taipei, Taiwan
CreditAttribution: JohnAlbin commented

My menu block only shows if the current node is a child of the menu.

The way it actually works is subtly different.

If the menu block is showing the top level links of the menu and 0 or more levels of links lower, the block will always appear. Because even when the current page is not in the menu, the top-level links of the menu should be shown.

If the menu block is showing the 2nd level of links or lower, then we won't know which set of child links to show until one of the parent links is in the active trail.

For example, if this is our menu tree:

  • a
    • a1
    • a2
  • b
    • a1
    • a2
  • c

If the menu block is configured to show 2nd level links and "c" is the active page, the block won't appear because there are no links at that level. If "a" is in the active trail, then a1-a2 will appear in the menu block. Make sense?

JohnAlbin’s picture

JohnAlbin
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Status: Active » Postponed (maintainer needs more info)

All sorted?

senortim’s picture

senortim CreditAttribution: senortim commented

Thanks, John. I appreciate your help with this. Having spent a bit of time with Menu Block since my first post, I do understand what you're talking about.

But what I'm trying to do is create submenus that can be displayed in a section of a web site. Basically, I have some pages that are part of my menu tree, and some pages that are not. (These latter pages are test results, and I don't want to put 500 nodes into the menu tree for each project.) For the pages that are not, I still want to show the section menu, so that visitors can get back to overview content, methodology, and so on, from test result pages.

Further, I'm putting all of these within a single Menu so that I don't have separate menus for every project. (I might have a ton of conferences and other events, too, each of which will need a submenu, and each of which may have content outside a menu tree.)

I don't know if this is helpful, but my tree is something like:

  • Project
    • Foo Project
      • Overview
      • Methology
      • Results
    • Bar Project
      • Overview
      • Methology
      • Results

I'm using Panels Variants and a taxonomy field to help me figure out what menu tree should be shown. (At least that's the plan; it's of course not working at the moment!) :-)

I would love a way to have a Menu Block that started from a fixed point in the menus. I'm guessing this isn't currently possible with your module.

Thanks again for any insights.
--Tim

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JohnAlbin
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CreditAttribution: JohnAlbin for ImageX commented
Issue summary: View changes
Status: Postponed (maintainer needs more info) » Closed (cannot reproduce)