Question

I need to change the menu links on my website (and leave the same items names) depending on the user is a guest, or authenticated user.

What’s the standard way to do it ?

thanks

Answer 1

You cannot dynamically change a menu item’s path, because menu items are cached.

Still, AFAIK, there are two ways to get what you want. Both methods require you to create your menu items with hook_menu in a custom module (not from the Menu UI).

The first method is to create two menu items with identical names and set the access rules so that one is only available for logged guests, the other for authenticated users. Since Drupal will only show menu items that the user is allowed to access, only one will show up at any given moment. In Drupal core, you can see how the user module creates a menu item for anonymous users by looking at the /user/login path in user_menu().

The second method is to create a single menu item and check in the menu callback if the user is logged in. If the user is logged in, you serve one page, if not you serve another. In Drupal core, the /user path works like this. See user_page to see how the code works.