After trying out the concept I posted in My pathauto + menu utopian dream I found out there were some major shortcomings.
- If you create a view that lists the nodes and then links to them you must include those child nodes in the menu structure for the secondary menu to actually show on the child node pages. While this is easy to work around, if you have a high volume site, do you really want thousands of node listed under your primary navigation? Also, using this method, the user adding the content MUST remember to add the node to the menu or all is lost.
- The default rendering of the secondary navigation only allows for one level deep in the menu. If you have a third level on your primary navigation, it won’t be shown.
These two points were major show stoppers in how I wanted to use the menus so I had to ditch this new method in favor of the old method. The good news is my reverting back to the old method was easy as creating two new menus and moving back the menu items.
I am aware that there are some functions I can crate/download/drop into the template.php but I was trying to avoid complicating the template.php due to an upcoming Drupal 5 to 6 upgrade. In addition I’m trying to be a Drupal purist to keep the site within what Drupal can do with modules/core alone.
Perhaps in the future this will be a more viable solution.
“The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley” -Robert Burns