Question

You can’t use wildcards in menu paths? A quick summary of my problem (which I’ve made sure makes sense, so you’re not wasting your time): I have a menu which i’m showing on node pages of a certain content-type. My path to a node page would be like…

events/instal2010

…where instal2010 would be the name of an event (event is the content-type).

I’m using the Context and Menu Block modules to place a menu in the sidebar on that page…

• Event (the default active item)
• Programme
• Visitor info
• Book tickets

… where the path for Programme would be

events/instal2010/programme

So for this to work for many different events, those menu items need a wildcard in their path, e.g.

events/*/programme

Perhaps it’s time to ditch menus and just use a block with php to determine what page we’re on from the URL.

Any advice from experienced hands would be awsome, thanks.

Answer 1

You cannot create menu items with wildcards from the administrative interface of Drupal, but you can create menu items with wildcards in a module. I would recommend creating a custom module that uses hook_menu() to create the menu items. An example implementation would look something like:

function YOURMODULE_menu() {
  $items = array();

  $items['events/%/programme'] = array(
    'title' => 'Programme',
    'description' => 'Loads a program page',
    'page callback' => 'YOUR CUSTOM FUNCTION NAME', // Custom function used to perform any actions, display the page, etc
    'page arguments' => array(1),  // Passes wildcard (%) to your page callback function
    'access callback' => TRUE, // Change if you want to control access
    'type' => MENU_NORMAL_ITEM, // Creates a link in the menu
    'menu_name' => 'primary-links' // Adds the link to your primary links menu, change if needed
  );

  return $items;
}

In $items['events/%/programme'] = array(, the % is the wildcard and it will be passed to your page callback function. It may be helpful to read more about hook_menu() and the Anatomy of hook_menu may also help as well.