I am adding this as a feature request, because things aren't really *broken* at present. However, I find it quite annoying that the default menus (Main Menu and User Menu) are hardcoded into the theme. This is bad for the following reasons:

  • One cannot make changes to the menu using the nice and user-friendly "gear links" that overlay on other UI elements (blocks, views, etc)
  • One cannot easily move either of these menus to a different region
  • One cannot easily remove either of these menus (requires editing the theme?)
  • Lastly, other themes are likely to replicate the default theme. This odd / bad menu behavior is replicated in many other themes

I hope other people understand my frustration with this. Try to see this from the perspective of a new user playing with Drupal for the first time. The UI consistency falls apart very quickly when they try to make changes to the menu.

As I've seen, these menus are only hardcoded into these regions on a conditional that they will not appear if other things are assigned to these regions. I don't think that's a sensible precaution, and it further defeats consistent UI. The expectation of most users is that when regions are empty, nothing appears inside of them. Requiring modifications to the theme to enter a region properly is strange. I hope this is sorted out for Drupal 8!

It's possible this bug should be filed someplace else in Core. Maybe the default menus need to be a part of the default configuration? I don't know how default configuration works. If I'm wrong in putting this issue here, please move it or something.

BTW, nice theme :)

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Version: 7.15 » 7.x-dev

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Status: Active » Closed (outdated)

Automatically closed because Drupal 7 security and bugfix support has ended as of 5 January 2025. If the issue verifiably applies to later versions, please reopen with details and update the version.