Posted by drm on November 13, 2009 at 4:26pm
We know that Drupal requires that menu entries have actual paths that exist, but that it deletes the menu entry if you change the path is a real problem. I have a client who has now deleted his menus three times because he changed the alias to it. He couldn't figure out what was causing it, and didn't wait to get an answer from me, so kept causing it to happen, because he kept changing the path.
I know that it's too late to ask for things in D7, but I'm curious if this condition still exists. And this experience has motivated me to try and get involved in usability.
Comments
Use internal pathes for menu
Hi drm.
You should always use internal pathes in menu entries. They get aliased as soon as the output happens.
This approach - even after changing aliases three times - leads always to a perfect output without breaking anything.
If you add nodes using the menu fieldset in node/edit form, the system does right this perfectly and automatically.
Every other usage should be considered wrong, and even detected and forbidden (or aliases should be unaliased on menu save).
Every other usage . . .
If the focus here is usability, then describing to a developer (me) how to do things doesn't really get us where we need to be. The person I'm talking to is not a developer and was working with the site and trying to set up menus. It would be one thing if Drupal prevented him from doing something that deleted his menu entry.
After hours of frustration, I've told him how to do it. But he isn't very happy with Drupal's usability right now. I understand what you're saying, but if somebody who is reasonably savvy on computers deletes existing menus by doing something as simple as changing a URL alias, then we have a usability issue. that's why I brought this issue here, and not to the menu module issues queue.