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Secondary menu

The Secondary links menu is a built in menu, similar to the Primary links menu. It is often placed just under the Primary links menu, and often in a slightly smaller font. The appearance depends on the theme you are using.

Having a second, fixed menu underneath the main menu is not normally very useful. The interesting thing about the Secondary links menu is that you can configure it to act like a sub-menu of the Primary links menu. That in, selecting an item in the Primary links menu can change what is displayed in the Secondary links menu.

The key to doing this is to create a Primary links menu with a single level of sub-menus. For instance try creating Primary links like this:

  • Home
  • Contact
    • USA
    • Europe
    • Asia
  • Legal
    • Terms
    • Privacy

ie, the top level menu has Home, Contact, Legal. Contact has sub-items USA, Europe, Asia. By default, the Primary links menu will only display thetop level items.

Go to Navigation | Administer | Site building | Menus and click the Settings tab. There are two fields of interest.

Source for primary links allows you to choose which menu should be displayed in the Primary links area. You don't have to use the Primary links menu. You could create a custom menu called, eg MyMenu and select that. The top level links from MyMenu would then be displayed in the main menu for the page.

Source for secondary links performs a similar function for the Secondary links area.

Where this becomes really useful if if you choose the same source for both the menus, ie if:

Source for primary links is set to Primary links and Source for secondary links is also set to Primary links

Then the Secondary links menu acts like a submenu to the Primary links menu. So, in our example above

  • if you select Home in the Primary links menu , the Secondary links menu will not be present.
  • if you select Contact in the Primary links menu , the Secondary links menu will show USA and Privacy items.
  • if you select Legal in the Primary links menu , the Secondary links menu will show Terms, Europe and Asia items.

This system only works to the second level of submenus. Any deeper nesting is ignored.