Improving Menu Views in Drupal 7 to Create Mega Menus More Efficiently

After a little over 9 months and with an impressive 1290 sites reporting they use it, Menu Views has undergone a little nip and tuck! Today, I have finally released Menu Views 2.0-rc1 in hopes to squash the ever so annoying bugs and wonderful feature requests that were made! This module has been an invaluable tool in the mega-menu creation process. It has solved a problem for many people: how to insert a view into the Drupal menu system.

Many Drupal sites I've seen through out the years (those that have complex mega-menus) left me perplexed at how to accomplish this task. I could never really imagine it happening effectively, unless it was rendered using views. After being able to finally see how some of these sites actually accomplished this great feat, I was also a little baffled at the shear complexity of making it happen.

Often times, the theme is the unsuspecting and unfortunate victim. Being hacked, sliced and injected with arbitrary code to succeed in rendering the desired result. Some prefer to do it this way and to them I say "be my guest". However, when a more dynamic approach is needed, it is far better to utilize the awesome power of Drupal. Which begs me to reiterate what the purpose of a CMS is for: letting the system actually manage the content (hmm novel idea).

Eureka! Let Drupal's own menu system and administrative user interface handle this complex problem! When I first released Menu Views (1.x) that is what it solved: inserting a view into the menu. However, it also introduced quite a few other problems that were unforeseen and rather complicated to fix. Namely these involved other contributed modules and the biggest native one: breadcrumbs!

Over the past few months, I really started digging into the complexity that is the menu system in Drupal. Trying to figure out what exactly I could do to help simplify how the replacement of links were intercepted and rendered. After pouring over the core menu module and several contributed modules, I began noticing several commonalities in the best approach: theme_menu_link().

In Menu Views-1.x I was intercepting theme_link() instead. In hindsight, I can't believe how incredibly stupid that was! So essentially, the old method intercepted every link on the site with the off chance it might be a menu link that had Menu Views configuration in the link's options array. Whoa... major performance hit and a big no-no! For this reason alone, that is why I decided to do a full version bump on Menu Views. Part of this decision was to consider existing sites and how they may have already compensated for view were popping up everywhere. An additional deciding factor involved refactoring the entire administrative user interface experience.

In Menu Views (1.x), there seemed to be a lot of confusion around "attaching" a view and optionally hiding the link using <view> in the link path. I thought about this for a while. Ultimately I decided that the best way to solve this would to separate the view form from the link form and give the administrator the option to choose what type of menu item this should be. In this way, menu views can more accurately determine when to intercept the menu item and render either the link or a view.

There are now a couple options to better manage what the breadcrumb link actually outputs as well. Along with rendering a title outside of the view if desired. Both of which can use tokens! No longer are we left with stuff extraneous markup in the view's header. Last but not least, one feat of UI marvel: node add/edit forms can control menu views and you're no longer limited to just the menu overview form!

Per some user requests, I have also set up a demonstration site so you can firebug to your heart's content: http://menuviews.leveltendesign.com. I push blocks on the left and right to show that it integrates well with Menu Block, Nice Menus and Superfish.

Overall, I think Menu View's new face lift will allow this module to reach a new level of maturity and stability that has been greatly needed. Thank you all for your wonderful suggestions in making this module a reality and truly a joy to code!

Stay tuned for next week: Theming Menu Views in Drupal 7