Force a menu item to be active
Update: For Drupal 6.x, use the excellent Menu Trails module.
I run into this issue every time I build a new site in Drupal. I typically use the Views module to create a list of nodes. A possible use of this is a list of news items on a news page.
The URL of the view goes into my drupal menu. Click on the view and Drupal correctly highlights this as the active page. However, click on one of the nodes in the view and you lose your position in the menu. This is by design. Drupal has no way of knowing the relationship between your view and node you're currently viewing. It's open for debate whether this is functionality that could be added by the Views module, but that's a story for another day.
Here's a little bit of code I use to instruct Drupal as to which should be highlighted as the active menu position. The code snippet can be inserted in various places, but it's probably easiest to put it in your page.tpl.php or node.tpl.php files:
<?php
if ($node->type == 'news') {
$items[] = array(
'path' => '<front>',
);
$items[] = array(
'path' => 'news',
);
$items[] = array(
'path' => drupal_get_normal_path($path),
);
menu_set_location($items);
}
?>This passes an array of pages (basically the breadcrumb trail to the current page) to the drupal function 'menu_set_location'. Modify the node type in the if statement, as well as the array declaration to match your needs and you should be back in business.
