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Working with menus and menu items

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User role
Content Editor Content Administrator
Task
Content editing
Topic
Content editing Menus and menu management
Product
Sector Ecosystem

Page nodes are hierarchical content organised in menus. Out of the box, your Sector site will have two public facing menus - the main menu and the footer menu.

In this guide

When to use the menu management and when to use the node edit form? 

Use the page node edit form to add a page to a menu and use the menu management to organise and sort the menu items. 

Organising a menu using the menu management

To see a list of menus on your site, use the AdminUI toolbar to navigate to Structure > Menus.

<your.domain>/admin/structure/menus

From the Menus page, you can select a menu to edit - for this guide we concentrate on the main menu.

What are all the other menus doing? 

Head over to Sector menu configuration to see how the menus are used. 

The 'Edit menu' screen then lists the links for the menu.


Screenshot of edit menu screen in AdminUI

Screenshot - Edit menu screen for a main menu


On the 'Edit menu' screen you can:

  • Reorder the menu links using the drag-and-drop handles ( 1 ). You can also reorder the menu by changing the 'weight' of each item ( 2 ).
  • Enable/disable a menu link ( 3 ). In some cases, you might want to list a page in a menu - for example to get the right URL alias or breadcrumb - but you might not display the menu link. In this case you can disable the link. 
  • Edit a menu link ( 4 ). This lets you change the title, link, description, and which part of the menu it is in.
  • Add a menu link ( 5 )

Why add a menu link via the menu management? 

In most cases, you will add add a page to a menu via its node edit form - it's much easier. But in case you want to link to a view page - or a node other than a page - you can add a manual menu link via the menu management. This is what we have done to add Resources - a view page - to the main menu in the Starter Kit.

Once you've made your changes to the menu, make sure to save it.

Changing the page URL when moving a page

If you move a page to another section of the menu (i.e. change its parent item), you need to update the URL alias.

For example, if you want to move <your.domain>/section-a/your-page to Section B, you will need to change the URL alias of the page to /section-b/your-page

You can change the URL alias in the standard node settings.

Adding a page to a menu (using the node edit form)

Pages are hierarchical content, so in most cases you should choose where in the hierarchy of your site each page goes. This is done by adding the page to one of the menus on your site. 

To add a page to a menu, you will need to edit the page node. In the node edit form, you can find the menu settings in the standard node settings sidebar.


Screenshot of menu settings in a page node edit form (with numbered highlights)

Screenshot - Adding a menu link in Menu settings

Select 'Provide a menu link' ( 1 ) in the menu settings. You should add a descriptive, short title for the menu link ( 2 ).

Selecting the 'Parent item' ( 3 ) decides which menu the page is in, and if it’s a child of another page. In the screenshot above, the ‘Level 2 page’ is in ‘Section A’ - a section entry page which is in the main menu.

To change the order of the menu links, you can set the 'Weight' of the menu item or use the menu management (this can be easier as you have a visual indication of where the item sits compared to other items).

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