Drupal Navigation Reloaded: Displaying Taxonomy and User Menus as Primary and Secondary links.

July 4, 2005 - 11:00am

UPDATE: I've writing a multipart tutorial on how this was done, follow it in order:

I've put together an example theme which impliments the top navigation menu that you see in this site. I'm very strapped for time at the moment, so I hope you'll forgive the lack of detailed instructions.

However, if you have any experience with creating new drupal themes, then you should have a very easy time figuring out how it works. It doesn't require any new database tables, or modules. All that is required is php-template. For the lovely categorization that you see in this site, you'll also need the taxonomy menu module, though.

There are four critical changes in the code that are worth highlighting

  • page.tpl.php (lines 8-11): Box Grey's default inclusion of stylesheets has been overrided. Now the path is static, and currently set to "themes/boxgreynav/style.php".
  • page.tpl.php (lines 33-43): The include for primary and secondary links was deleted and replaced with a function that calls the user menus [theme_menu_tree($pid)].
  • Box Grey's style.css was converted to style.php to allow inclusion of menu.php
  • The dense CSS coding in the file menu.php is the "magic" that makes this work. The complexity of it made it difficult for even me to switch colors for backgrounds and links. Thus, I've converted the CSS file into a php file. See the file for notes on how that works

That's enough for now, let me know if this works, fails, or makes you want to set buildings on fire.

Download Boxgrey Example