Community Feedback for Menu Editor

Look in the admin menu, there should be new items at
Site building > Menus > List menus > [menu name].

This takes you to the new "power edit" tab of that menu, which should look like the screenshot.

That's a great idea :)
I hope it doesn't make the entire thing too heavy on client side. There can be a lot of these fields in a big menu!! So I guess I make it an optional submodule.

I made the autocomplete work on my localhost, but I'm not really happy with it.
Drupal's built-in autocomplete only applies to one input field.

What we want is type the title in the title field with an autocomplete dropdown, but then if I select one of the autocomplete choices, I want the path to be inserted in the path input field, and the title in the title field. Then I want the focus to remain on the title field, so I can adjust the title if needed.

I'll see if it can be done - but it will be more than just the normal autocomplete.

I developed and used the module with my own Zen sub-themes, and I know about the width issue.

The quickest solution for you is to disable the sidebar blocks in the admin area, giving more space for the main content. You can do that in the blocks settings (a lot of redundant work, if you have many blocks), or you can let your theme do it by itself. Or use an admin theme (that can be a sub-theme of your main theme, to make it look seamless).

If I would change the module, I think I would make a collapse/expand for table columns. Which could be a module of its own, that could work for other tables as well :)

See #666644: Path Autocomplete for Menu Editor.
I will post a zip there.

@austintnacious (#6):
You can use Region Visibility to get rid of the sidebars for the admin area. I think this is the best solution.

@wentsch:
I have not thoroughly tested this module with a multilanguage site. I suspect there is some more work waiting for me. I had some WTFs with the way the menu i18n currently works (without this module), and I was hoping that I could find a solution with this module.

@Abdussamad:
What is your use case for deleting all items in a menu? Is this really an everyday situation?

@karlkablisk (#15)
Thanks for the feedback!
Could you create a seperate issue for the bug report?

Also I don't completely understand your problem description. From what I understand, these are two separate things - correct?

1. You did some work on a menu, then clicked save, and the menu was messed up. Or at least, it didn't look the way you expected it to look. Is this what happened? Can you explain in more detail what exactly you did, what you expected to happen, and what happened instead? (in the new thread, preferably)

2. The "create content" form.

if I create the menus and go there for the first time as admin, it will prompt me to the edit page immediately, thats because the menu was created but there's no PAGE.

That's exactly what's supposed to happen. There is no page, so you are invited to create it, if you have the permission.
However, I noticed that people often don't understand this concept in the first place, and ask me why they are seeing this page.

Some ideas I had to improve this work flow:
- Better explanation on the "create content" page, to avoid the confusion.
- An option to show an "under construction" page to users who don't have permission to see the "create content" form. Actually I hate the typical dead end links that end in an "under construction" page, and would rather show an empty menu. But if people want to have it, why not, make it optional.
- Tabs or other controls on the "create content" page, that allow to choose a different content type, or even delete or rename the menu item.

It could work like this:
- A new placeholder <under construction> would show a node page saying "under construction", but instead of the [edit] tab, you would see tabs for [create page], [create webform], etc. The active tab would be [under construction]
- The placeholders <new page> or <new webform> would show the same forms as they do now, but they would have tabs for [under construction], [create page], [create webform], etc.

One problem is that you would get really a lot of tabs, if you have many content types. So maybe it can be something else, instead of tabs.

EDIT:
The dev release (once the packaging script will run) does support a "" placeholder, that will link the menu item to an "under construction" page. This is useful for a site in a staging phase.

@cjwhite (#17):
I completely agree with that.

However:
This module (menu_editor) does only provide a new way to manage the table contents of menu_links. There is nothing you could store in this table that would have the desired effect of providing a non-clickable text instead of a link. Everything stored in link_path needs to be either a valid sytem path, or an external URL, or "<front>". Even the placeholders that appear as "<new page>" are in fact valid system paths, just masked as "<new page>" for the admin interface.

One could try to do this on the theme layer, and automatically filter for a specific system path (like "menu/dead/link"), but there will probably remain some places that can't be changed that easily (think of breadcrumbs). From my experience, the menu system is not the most pleasant thing to work with.

Maybe if you send the entire page through a find-and-replace..

I think the desired functionality, if technically possible, would well deserve its own module. I would happily provide assistance for that in menu_editor, if someone would code this thing.

@Abdussamad (#11)
"javascript powered select all and deselect all checkbox."

See
#702394-3: Snapshot/Beta Testing for Menu Editor 6.x-2.x
and help testing!

@karlkablisk (#22):

"I create a bunch of menus".
"poof, I have 2 of that menu."
Do you actually create a bunch of menus, or a bunch of menu items in one and the same menu? To me it sounds like you are talking all about items, not about menus.

"yeah it took me a while to realize why it didnt default to a blank page like when you normally make a page with nothing in the content field."
The dev snapshot has a new placeholder, "<new>", which gives you exactly what you want - an "under construction" page with the title (to show to your clients, for instance). I am still thinking about a solution that would allow to customize this page.

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I tried to reproduce this bug with the dev snapshot version, and I can't. It all works as expected.
Atm I don't have a site available that uses the 1.0 version.. maybe another day.
Could you try with the dev snapshot?

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"You can start one on this topic if you like."
I think an issue like this would deserve at least one post from a person who has actually seen this bug, if it exists! (that would be you) If I can reproduce I will create the issue myself.

I noticed that the module description page is growing too long.

Planned features

Item visibility: The core menu edit form uses the same routine to load menu items like any menu block. As an admin, however, you often want to see the complete menu, with items in all languages, and including broken items or items that would be hidden for you in a regular menu block.

Mutlilanguage: You often want to create "parallel" menu structures for different languages. For all untranslated nodes you want to link to the original version or hide that menu item completely. And to make things worse, some of the menu items don't link to nodes but to other things, which also want to be translated. In future versions of this module I would like to give you more control about the language of menu items.

Textarea for new items: This would allow your client to write a menu structure (consisting of page titles) in a text editor of his/her choice, structured by indentation, without ever touching the admin backend. You (the admin) paste that thing in a textarea, and the new structure is merged into the existing menu tree.

List orphan page nodes: Below the menu table, show a list of page nodes (or node types of your choice) that are not in any other menu, so you can drag them in as new menu items. The idea is that you can easily repair a broken structure, and keep track of nodes created without the <new page> trick.

This thread is not as popular as I thought it could be. Closing this for now.