Become an IA Superstar

Learn how to slice, sort, expand, and tweak Drupal’s menus in flexible ways to build a usable Information Architecture for your website.

Drupal 7 comes with a fantastic menu system. Unfortunately, the ways that core presents that navigation is limited to breadcrumbs and full “trees” displayed in blocks. Additionally, Drupal presents unique challenges to site builders who don’t want their users to go off the rails and get lost (the “disappearing menu” problem.)

With the rise of new widespread IA patterns like mega menus and new challenges like the lack of hovering on touch screen mobile devices, Drupal must adapt or die.

In this session we’ll explore several contrib modules that extend Drupal’s menu system to provide solutions to all these IA issues, including Menu block, Menu position, Menu item container, and Mega menu, many of which are used on the Drupalcon Chicago site.

Intended audience:

Site builders working on any medium or large website. And people looking to engage, laugh and share during the presentation and discussion.

Questions answered by this session

1. How do I display the primary links at the top and the child links in the sidebar? And why can't Drupal core do that?
2. How can I build a mega menu even cooler than the one on the Drupalcon site? How can I keep it accessible?
3. How can I fix Drupal’s disappearing navigation problem? I want all my blog posts to look like they are underneath “Blogs” in the menu! #%?&!!!
4. How do I create drop-down menus for hover-less touch-based mobile devices, like the iPad?
5. How can I get editorial control over the placement of menu items in column-based navigation blocks?