Navigation menu

The Navigation menu is an important built-in menu in Drupal. It provides facilities for controlling your user account, creating content, and administering the site.

The Navigation menu has your user name as a heading. If you follow the practice of using admin as your administrator user name, the Navigation menu will have the heading admin (when you are logged in), and will contain the familiar entries:

• My account
• Create content
• Administer
• Log out

This, of course, is where you spend most of your time while administering the site.

The content of the Navigation menu can change, depending on which modules are installed and the permissions of the current user. If you are logged in as an authenticated user, say user1, the Navigation menu will have the heading user1, and will contain the entries:

• My account
• Create content
• Log out

If you are logged out, the menu won't usually be visible at all.

Navigation menu structure

Go to Navigation | Administer | Site building | Menus | Navigation and select the List items tab. You will see the structure of the Navigation menu.

Don't start altering it at this stage! You use this menu to administer your site, if you move things around you can create difficulties for yourself. This sort of mistake wouldn't be the end of the world, but it can be a pain to put right so it is best avoided.

If you look at the structure, you will see that it is a hierarchy. The Create content item contains sub-items such as Page and Story. Administer contains a whole tree of sub-items. This should not surprise you, because you have been using this menu, and what you see on the List items page reflects the nested menus you have been using so far.

A couple of other things. You will notice that some menu items are not enabled. The Navigation menu is present on every Drupal site, so the developers have provided a few extra facilities which not everybody might want. You can easily enable them if they are useful for your site.

Getting out of trouble

Most items in the Navigation menu cannot be deleted. This is to help protect you from locking yourself out of the system by deleting an important link. However, it is possible to disable entries. For example you can disable the entire Administer sub-menu. If you do that by accident, how do you get back in to fix it?

You can find you way back to the Navigation menu settings by entering the URL into the address bar (use your own domain):

<a href="http://www.cookiewiki.com/admin/build/menu-customize/navigation" title="www.cookiewiki.com/admin/build/menu-customize/navigation">www.cookiewiki.com/admin/build/menu-customize/navigation</a>

Then re-enable everything you need to.

Customising the Navigation menu

You can add new links to the Navigation menu. Go to Navigation | Administer | Site building | Menus | Navigation and choose the Add item tab. This is exactly the same as adding an item to the Primary links menu.

Be careful what you add. The Navigation menu already performs a number of functions (essentially administrative), think carefully before adding even more functions. Consider creating a new custom menu instead.

You can also reorganise the menu, if you really want to. In the List items tab, drag the items around to re-organise them. You can drag items up and down to re-order then, or left and right to change the hierarchy. Before doing this, always remember that this will leave you with a non-standard Drupal admin menu, whuch might be a pain for anyone who is used to working with standard Drupal.