I'm no module developer, so I'm not sure how complex my request is - but I have a project where nodes live 2-3 menu item levels deep (and sometimes parents live in separate, secondary menus). It would be very helpful if I could select multiple parent items. Thanks for your assistance!

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davyvdb’s picture

davyvdb CreditAttribution: davyvdb commented
Assigned: Unassigned » davyvdb
Status: Active » Closed (works as designed)

Your request is something I hear a few times from clients. It's not easily possible in Drupal. And it's not something this module could do. We did it once with shadow nodes. But it was pretty complicated.

porg’s picture

porg CreditAttribution: porg commented

@ urbanbricks : I do not really understand your request! How do you imagine multiple parents practically? In the menu, only ONE end point (and the trail elements which lead to it) can be active!

Except if you unfold the whole menu tree, then one could see the entire tree, with all its branches and children, and mark multiple items and the trails which led to them as active. But visually this is impossible for menu layout approaches such as "NavBar" or "Slide down/left" as the items would overlap themselves, and not all active elements could be seen. Only for "Accordion" layout style it would be possible, but practically also almost impossible, as many branches/subbranches would be unfolded, consuming a lot of screen space!

Hence, practically, only one of your multiple parents can be active! Then an algorithm would need to decide, which of the multiple parents to choose as THE ONE active menu item. And how should this be decided? This is what you did not think through, in my opinion. I can hardly figure out a reason. If you have thoughts on this, I would be delighted to read them!

The practical reason for modules such as "Node Trail", "Menu Trail" in my opinion is this:

To some nodes you get through a View or Search, or from an external link or external search engine.
If this node is not a child in a hierarchic menu structure, nothing in the menu would show as active.
If the user wants to continue navigating on your site, it would help if the current node shows up associated to somewhere in the menu, or some other navigation indication.
This is where these modules kick in and associate the node to ONE menu item.