Adding New Content to a Menu

Most of the time, when you create a new piece of content like a Basic Page, you will want to add it to the menu. The system defaults to having no menu, so there are a few steps you must take to make that happen.

Screen shot showing the location of the menu settings in the right sidebar.

Open up the MENU SETTING and check the box “Provide a menu link”. Checking the box will display several additional fields that you will need to fill out.

Screen showing the menu settings

If you have already written a TITLE for your content, it will automatically appear in the MENU LINK TITLE field. You can also override this and delete the content or edit it to whatever you would like to appear. The text in this field is what will appear as the link in the menu for this page.

The DESCRIPTION field is optional. If you add text to this field it will appear as a tool tip when a reader hovers over the link.

The PARENT ITEM is a dropdown that allows to select which menu the page should belong to, and where in the menu it should live.

Screenshot of the menu options

By selecting one of the options, you are assigning a “parent” to your page. Your page will live UNDER the selected page in the menu. Looking at the above screenshot, if you select “Admissions” the page will be a direct child of the main Admissions page. If you select “Visit the Middlebury Institute” it would be a child of that page a “sibling” to Downtown Monterey and Getting Here.

IMPORTANT:

An option in angle brackets is telling us the menus name - it is not a page. So DO NOT SELECT<Admissions>. Instead, you want to select ”— Admissions”.

Sorting a Menu

The default sort order for menu items is alphabetical. If you need to use a different sort order, select Structure in the admin toolbar at the top of the page and then Menus.

From here you will see a list of the menus you have access to edit. Click List Links next to the one you want to reorder.

You can then use the crosshair icon to the left of each menu item to drag it to the desired location in the menu.

External Menu Links

Menus can contain links to pages outside your site. To add an external menu link, select Structure in the admin toolbar at the top of the page and then Menus. From here you will see a list of the menus you have access to edit. Click List Links next to the one where you'd like to add an external link and then click the + Add Link button at the top of the page. From here, enter a Menu link title and put the URL into the Link field. You can choose where the link will appear in the menu using the Menu link positive preview below.

A screenshot of Drupal's Add menu link dialog showing a link to example.com being added.