Planet Drupal TV

There's a mistake I've made which a few others have made too. The mistake is rushing into your new Drupal site and populating your menu right away. You simply add new menu items as placeholders until you can create or add the data. You set the menu path to something like , and populate away.

The frustrating part about this, is that your menus may not work as expected - at least when expecting cascading menus using the Primary links (or any other menu) as a hierarchy. Drupal needs to have something to point to in order to build it's internal menu.

This video looks at using Drupal menus, specifically how to use the secondary menu concept to create a relation between your top level menu items and a child menu. Once we set them up, I play around in the theme to change up where they get displayed. I also play a bit with the CSS classes that are used. Besides learning about secondary menus, this video is also a brief intro to tweaking the page.tpl.php file of your theme.

The Drupal menu system is very smart about when it shows menus. It knows when a user has access to the menu, based on the roles the user has, and ultimately, the permissions the user has.