As discussed here, #737136: Put together a list of must-have features for new core themes and set a final deadline for implementing them, core themes should support the core menu feature of coupling the primary and secondary links from the same menu.

This entails displaying them in such a way that they can make sense as two related lists.

Stark currently shows secondary links at the very bottom of the left sidebar; when the coupling feature is enabled there is no sense of these two sets of links being connected.

Comments

Jacine’s picture

Jacine
she/her
Location New York
CreditAttribution: Jacine commented

Based on the actual descriptions of the menus, I guess it does make the way it is now. I totally agree that it is a WTF, but I worry that any "fix" for it will also be a WTF.

We really need menu_block in core (#474004: Add options to system menu block so primary and secondary menus can be blocks rather than variables) + regions in themes for menus, so people can just use configurable blocks (#503810: Convert primary and secondary menus to blocks). IMO, this is would make the most sense.

joachim’s picture

joachim CreditAttribution: joachim commented

Agreed that menu_block in core is needed to make this feature make more sense; however that's not going to happen for 7.

Jacine’s picture

Jacine
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Location New York
CreditAttribution: Jacine commented

Right, so what else can we do? Any ideas? I don't think requiring the menus to be next to each other is a good option. It's not flexible enough design wise. Given that the default install leads to a user menu, the wtf would be even worse if the secondary menu was located right underneath the primary. And then it would introduce a "No footer menu" wtf.

David_Rothstein’s picture

David_Rothstein CreditAttribution: David_Rothstein commented

For anyone coming new to this issue, @joachim has a great description here of the overall feature and how it's supposed to work: http://drupal.org/node/683026#comment-2599196

Also, @webchick recently marked #410646: "Secondary menu" exists but is no longer the default source for the secondary links critical, but it sounds like the reason she thought it was critical is more about this issue than that one, so maybe there's hope of fixing this in D7 after all :)

Re #3, I don't think "no footer menu" is a problem since you can use blocks for that. And in general, we could just fix this in core by putting them next to each other in all core themes, but then say it's up to contrib themes to choose between putting the primary and secondary links near each other vs not supporting the primary/secondary coupling feature. That would be the minimal (though not ideal) solution. But it is probably true that even some themes which "correctly" supported this (by putting the primary and secondary links near each other) might still look odd with the default of having the user menu displayed there.

David_Rothstein’s picture

David_Rothstein CreditAttribution: David_Rothstein commented
Status: Active » Closed (duplicate)

At this point there's a pretty active discussion going on at #410646: "Secondary menu" exists but is no longer the default source for the secondary links about a comprehensive solution to the overall problem, so I think it's worth doing something slightly unorthodox here and just marking this as a duplicate issue (even though it didn't start off as one).