Drupal: menus and submenus?

[EdwardMartinIII]

I've managed to install Drupal, set permissions and even upload a few themes. I think I managed to even build a starter menu.

The thing that's throwing me off, though, is building sub-menus.

But I might be missing something.

I built my menu by adding content, and for each of the pages (Services, Partners, Contact, etc.), I clicked "Provide a Menu Link". For "Parent item", I selected "<Main Menu" which appears to be the default.

That appears to produce a top-level menu that operates as I want.

I get into trouble when I try to build a sub-menu:

I add a new page of content (say, "Headquarters Location"). I click "Provide a menu link". Under "Parent item", I select (for example) "Contact".

My goal with this is that when the visitor hovers over "Contact", another menu pops beneath it, including "Headquarters Location" and the other sub-items.

I would think parenting the pages would have been enough, but I seem to be missing something fundamental, here.

Help?

Thanks!




Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[spamjim]

It sounds like you are building the menu properly. You just need to give the menu interaction some direction. The expansion of a menu with mouseover is handled through your CSS and javascript. Not every stock Drupal theme does this.

Modules are often employed to help with menus:

http://drupal.org/project/nice_menus

http://drupal.org/project/nice_primary_menus

http://drupal.org/project/dhtml_menu

http://drupal.org/project/jquerymenu

You can try this theme for a decent implementation of suckerfish menus:

http://demo.roopletheme.com/whitejazz/

(While Tek-Tips is a great forum, you would do well to set up a Drupal.org account and seek help there.)

 

[EdwardMartinIII]

Hm... I allmost seem to have it.

The site I'm fiddling with is:

http://www.properangle.com/

I seem to have the pop-up menu thing operating, but only AFTER I click a menu item.

For example, if you browse along the top line of items, no submenus pop up, but if you actually CLICK "Movies," suddenly there's a little down-arrow and now the submenu pops up when you click it.

The menu module I'm using is called Superfish, and I guess I've made some sort of configuration error.

I think...


Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[kjv1611]

Yeah, you'll have to find the correct config options for whichever module you go with for sure.

Also, as a note (you may already know this) in Drupal. If you go to YourSite.com/admin/build/menu, you can find whichever menu you're using, and edit there. One of the nice features of the main system is how you can simply click and drag items where you want them within a given menu. That includes making them "primary" or "secondary" simply by dragging left or right.

Give it a spin to see what I'm talking about. For your site, you'd go to:

http://www.properangle.com/admin/build/menu

(assuming you're already logged in as the administrator).

And some modules will be more buggy than others as well. If you continue toiling with no success with the current one, and don't want to dig into the code to try and fix the issue, then you could always try another module. Simply uncheck the one that doesn't seem to work correclty, and check the one that you want to try next... under /admin/build/modules.

Those links, by the way, are assuming you're using Drupal version 6. If you're using the latest, version 7, then the direct links might be a little different - I forget. I've only been playing around with D7 off and on for the past few months... more off than on.

 

[EdwardMartinIII]

I've nailed it. I ended up using a superfish menu, and it seems to work very nicely.

I'm using Drupal 7.


Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[kjv1611]

Glad to hear. I'm hoping to be able to move a couple of D6 based sites to D7. Drupal 7 is far superior when it comes to regular maintenance. It's a sinch! Before, you'd have to move this here, back this up there first, and dont' forget to change this permission, THEN move this file.... and disable this and do that..

In D7, so far, for the most part, it's "install this.." "enable this"... "update this"... via a few clicks... maybe pasting a web url for a new module install.

But I'm waiting for a few modules I use to catch up before I can really make use of it.

 

[EdwardMartinIII]

So far, I'm nine kinds of happy with the interface of Drupal 7.

Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[EdwardMartinIII]

I'm actually quite glad (so far) that I didn't come in at an earlier version of Drupal. This is my first experience using a CMS. Helluva learning curve!


Edward

"Cut a hole in the door. Hang a flap. Criminy, why didn't I think of this earlier?!" -- inventor of the cat door

 

[kjv1611]

The last one wasn't bad, but the newer one is just SO much better. It really is a dream. I keep getting frustrated, b/c I can't get this or that to work just like I want, being dependent upon specific modules that haven't yet been successfully upgraded. Can't wait 'till they are.

Glad to hear about your experience, though.