Alma Technology

Drupal allows you to define multiple navigation menus for your site. The theme for your site also reserves regions where these menus may be displayed. Typically themes reserve a place for what are called "Primary Links" and "Secondary Links", as well as multiple regions for blocks, which may also contain menus.

How many menus you have and where and when they are displayed depends on the purpose of your site (and personal preference). A simple business "brochureware" site might only display a single menu in the primary links region, with the default "Navigation" menu displayed only to logged in site administrators in a block. A site for members of a club might only display the default Navigation menu. A complex "social networking" site might have many different menus and where and when these are displayed may depend on the user's level of access, and/or the section of the site the user is currently looking at.

You can add, edit, disable, or delete menu items via "Administration" -> "Menus" ( "Administration" -> "Site building" -> "Menus" in Drupal 5 and later).

When adding or editing a menu item, the first three options ("TItle", "Description", "Path") are fairly self-explanatory.

The "Expanded" option determines whether any sub-menu items beneath this menu item are displayed or hidden by default. Having sub-menu items displayed by default can save your users a click or two when navigating through your site, but it can also make your menus very long.

The "Parent Item" setting determines in which menu an item resides, and whether it is a sub-menu item of another menu item.

"Weight" determines where in a list an item will reside. Since web sites frequently deal with lists of information, you will find the concept of "weight" cropping up in several differnt contexts in Drupal. In the context of menus, menu items at the same level in a menu heirarchy are sorted first by weight, and then alphabetically. Lower weighted items will "float". So a menu item with a weight of "10" will be lower in a list than an item with a weight of "5", and an item with a weight of "-3" will be higher than an item with a weight of "0". Items with the same weight are sorted alphabetically.