Support for Drupal 7 is ending on 5 January 2025—it’s time to migrate to Drupal 10! Learn about the many benefits of Drupal 10 and find migration tools in our resource center.The main feature of Monster Menus is to provide a hierarchal "tree" of pages within Drupal. These pages have several properties including a URL alias, a title, a list of nodes to display on the page, and most importantly lists of users and groups who have various levels of access to edit the page. The tree begins with the Home page and contains two sub-page leaves "users" and "groups" which will be discussed in more detail later. Other sub-pages can be added to the Home page to create the site.
Each page in the tree can be accessed either by listing the alias of it and its parents in the URL (as would be expected in a traditional web site), by entering just the Monster Menus Tree ID (an auto-incrementing field in the mm_tree table), or preceding the mmtid with "mm". For example, the "Academics" sub-page of the "Home" page with mmtid 1234 can be accessed through these URLs:
The Page Settings Form
The page settings form can be accessed by adding "/settings" to the URL for any page in the site. The settings form allows users with "Delete/change settings" permission to make changes to the page configuration. A variation of the settings form is also used when adding new sub-pages to the site.
General Settings
- Page name
- This is the "display name" of the page, used for links in menus as well as the page title. (ex. Academic Programs)
- URL name
- This name is used as an alias for the page in URLs. It can only contain lowercase letters, numerals, hyphens, periods, and underscores. (ex. academic-programs).
Flags
Flags are admin-only settings on the page that allow for special page handling behavior. Only users with the "administer all menus" permission will see this section.
Permissions
Monster Menus permissions -- like file-system permissions -- apply only to the page or content for which they are set: having full "write" permission on a page does not imply write access to sub-pages or content on the page. However, Monster Menus Permissions -- also like file-system permissions -- are "sticky": when new sub-pages are created, the permissions from the parent page are copied onto the sub-page and the creator of the sub-page is set as the owner.
The following permissions levels can be granted to users or groups.
- Owner
- Full "write" access to the page. The owner of a page is usually the person who created it. The owner has full "write" access to the page, the same as the Delete/change settings permission. The owner exists so that at least one person always has access to a page. The owner is never copied to sub-pages or content when cascading permissions, only when a new sub-page is created. Therefore, you need to add the owner as an individual or group if you want to cascade their permissions to sub-pages.
- Delete/change settings
- Full "write" access to the page. Users with this permission can change all of the properties of a page: its title, settings, and permissions. This permission is a super-set of the Append sub-pages, Add content, and Read permissions.
- Append sub-pages
- Users with this permission can add sub-pages to a page, but cannot change the page's settings or add content directly to the page. When a user creates a sub-page they will be the owner of that sub-page and will have full "write" access to that sub-page; giving them the ability to add content and append further sub-sub-pages to that sub-page. This permission is a super-set of the Read permission.
- Add content to the page
- Users with this permission can add new content to a page. When they create new content they will become the owner of that content and can continue to make changes to it. This permission does NOT grant users the ability to edit content already on a page. Content already on the page is only editable if the user is the owner of that content or has the Edit or delete this content permission on that content (see the section on the node settings form). This permission is a super-set of the Read permission.
- Read
- This permission allows a user to see the content.
- Theme for this page and its children
- The theme chosen here will be applied to the page and its sub-pages. However, a sub-page can choose to use a different theme, overriding this setting. The ability to control which theme is used for a portion of the site is a key feature of Monster Menus.
- Allowed themes for this page and its children
- Administrators can use this to constrain which themes users are allowed to apply to a portion of the site. For instance, if your University site is divided into an Undergraduate and a Graduate program, you might have a different set of themes for each program and only allow each set to be applied to its portion of the site. Only users with the "administer all menus" permission will see this setting.
- Don't show this page in the menu
- If checked, this page will not be listen in the navigation menu but can still be accessed directly using its URL address by anyone with permission to view the page. Also, pages which have been hidden from the menu cannot be reordered. Only pages with Location on screen (see below) set to Standard page or New sub-section will be shown in menus, so this setting does not apply to other Monster Menus Blocks.
- Location on screen
- "Standard page" means that the page will show menu items according to the number of child and parent sections set below. "New sub-section" will hide any parent items from the menu. There are other options in this list for any Monster Menus Blocks you have created for your site.
- Max. number of child levels to display
- Allows you to control the number of child pages displayed in the menu when viewing this page.
- Max. number of parent levels to display
- As the user gets deeper down in the menu tree, higher-level entries will be removed. This keeps a deeply-nested menu from getting too indented. This setting is inherited by any sub-pages.
- Allow the menu and its children to be reordered
- An admin-only setting to determine whether users can reorder the menu. This setting is inherited by any sub-pages.
- Default attirbution style
- Unless disabled by an administrator, this value will be the default for all new content added to this page. This can also be overridden in the Appearance settings of the node setting form for the content.
- Who can add comments by default
- Unless disabled by an administrator, this value will be the default for all new content added to this page. This can also be overridden in the Comment settings of the node setting form for the content.
- Show only the previews ("teasers") of all contents
- Whether to show the full node contents or just the teasers.
- Pieces of content display to one time
- If more than this number of pieces of content is present, pagination controls will be displayed. This setting is inherited by any sub-pages unless overridden.
- Allowed node types for this page and its children
- An admin-only option that allows you to control which content types are used in each section of the site. For instance, your University site might have a special content type for Athletics team rosters that you don't want to be available to the English Department. Only users with the "administer all menus" permission will see this setting.
- Archive
- Contents past a certain age will be automatically moved to a secondary page, where they are organized by date.
Manually cascading permissions
Sometimes it is necessary to reset the permissions for part of the site. This might be necessary if a new user or group needs to be granted access to a large number of pages and content-nodes. Two check-boxes at the bottom of the permissions form allow permissions to be recursively set on all sub-pages and/or content.
Use caution with these options as they will overwrite all permissions on sub-pages and/or content to be the same as the permissions on the page where they are used. The ability to use these options can be granted or revoked using Drupal's Permissions page.
