Investigation of Drupal's Menu System Uncovers Unexpected Treasure

Today, I spent quite a bit of time wandering drupal's menu system in search of answers. But instead, I uncovered two techniques which made me rethink the questions I was asking. As the latter sentence suggested, I'm a professional writer of fortune cookies on the side (there aren't many of us left...).

 Firstly, we have a very simple technique of locating any menu item (works best with large trees, like "administration", "settings") that exists in the user, node, or admin interface. For me, at least, exploring these techniques has really begun to shift my thinking on the relationship between theming and menus.

I'm probably just tired, but I have this vision of free range administration, user, and publish menus (which, like their chicken cousins, are more healthy, and happier). These menus can be placed in any site's page.tpl.php file, and you're user interfaces will sprout like chia-pets.

Below, is a screenshot of "ghettotacular", which I am naming this early version of an all-theme based dashboard

1. The "duh" technique (will fetch an adminstration menu by path in this example):

<?php $sqlquery = db_fetch_object(db_query("SELECT mid FROM {menu} WHERE path = 'admin' ")) $adminmenu = theme_menu_tree($sqlquery->mid);?>

This works well for trees such as "content", "settings", "logs" etc. if you are styling an admin interface. When combined with global $user; $user->id, this technique becomes particularly effective for theming a "special little place" for your each user. You do want your users to feel at home, don't know?

2. The "whoa" technique -- named after my reaction. This technique was stolen from node.module's theming function that generates the node/add definition  list(out of all things), and the variable $publishmenu can then easily be passed to page.tpl.php. I rewrote it to generate an unordedlist that uses the $node->type value to generate a CSS class, hints, the icons on what nevertheless behaves like a menu, and has been coded entirely in the theme. "Events", is CCK content type, by the way. The class is .content-events.

<?php foreach (node_get_types() as $type => $name) { if (module_invoke(node_get_base($type), 'access', 'create', $type)) { $out = '

'. l($name, "node/add/$type", array('class' => $type, 'title' => t('Add a new %s.', array('%s' => $name)))) .'

'; $item[$name] = $out; } } if (isset($item)) { uasort($item, 'strnatcasecmp'); $publishmenu = '

' . implode('', $item) .'

'; } print $publishmenu; ?>