Drupal 6 Nice Menus CSS issue?

Last night I ran into an issues with the latest 6.x.2.x-dev version of nice menus, yeah I know I should not be running a dev version on a live site. My site is not for commercial purposes, just a place to put my thoughts and notes on a variety of subjects.

After updating to the latest version, to my horror it was broken. I had incorporated the downdown menus from the Nice Menus horizontal children example, that was the look and function I wanted for this site as you can see above.

Up until the update everything was working great, so when applying the latest update I suddenly found that instead of a horizontal menu everything was vertical. My first thought was I had missed something, it was a CSS issue, which lead me down the wrong path.

After checking and double checking everything, I re-installed the previous update and everything worked fine. I knew the problem had to be located in the new update and not within the CSS.

It should be noted I’m using Nice Menus only for the secondary links and had hard coded it into the template.

down-down-1.jpg

And this had been working perfectly up until the update, now suddenly it was broken, so back to the troubleshooting challenge. The only other place it could be was something was changed in the nice-menus.module yet looking here I really could not see anything that might be different.

After staring at it for awhile, the thought came to me since within the nice-menus.module its named nice_menus, could it be that simple? I went back to the template and change it to:

down-down-2.jpg

Now I have no idea why it worked before, yet every example I had seen about hard coding into the template listed it as nice_menu not nice_menus

Hopefully, if your experiencing this problem this might be a fix. I guess the best advice is don’t run dev modules unless you like to live on the edge and are willing to spend a few hours troubleshooting.

Just An Update: This site is now using the Drupal Theme LiteJazz and suckerfish menus.

Comments on this entry are closed.

  • add1sun Feb 12, 2009 @ 14:25

    Hi Glenn, so yeah the theme functions changed in the last cvs commit to make them comply with proper naming conventions. You can see the diff here: . The legacy function should have worked for you though, so I’ll need to go back and look at why they didn’t. I have not been doing any upgrade path testing for the dev version at all yet, so yes, you need to be very careful when you use dev versions and it is a good habit to look at the changes before you upgrade. You can see recent code commits using the “View CVS messages” link on a project page (at the bottom under Development). When a CVS message has a #1234 number that will take you to the issue from the queue that is associated with the change and probably explains a bit more.

    I should also note that I do appreciate people who use and test dev versions so I can get feedback and I can fix things up. I don’t use Nice menus on any of the sites I manage so I am dependent on users to report bugs to me. So, please create an issue stating the problem you had since this will be an upgrade issue for everyone when they move to the 6.x-2.x version once it is officially released. Also, if you are interested in having the horizontal stuff directly in NM, there is an issue with a patch that could use some love . Thanks for blogging this! 🙂

    • Glenn Feb 12, 2009 @ 15:41

      Hi add1sun,

      Thanks for stopping by and providing a more detailed explanation. I’ve been happy with the module, and yes I’ve noticed the child issues with the horizontal menus and have just not played with the css enough to make it work.

      Thanks for all the work that has gone into these modules.

      • Anonymous Mar 9, 2009 @ 8:01

        I am wondering how you were able to get your drop downs to appear flush to the left side of your main tabs. The site I am working on displays them several pixels to the right. http://www.jni-consulting.com Can you help me figure out where my menus are not dropping down directly under the main tabs.

        • Glenn Mar 9, 2009 @ 22:02

          I’m guessing that you have download the code for the downdown menu from here Nice Menus horizontal children You will see in the css code under ul.nice-menu-downdown a section left: 5em I have mine set to 0em.

          That is where you would want to start with the CSS.

          • Anonymous Mar 10, 2009 @ 4:09

            Thanks a bunch! Actually I had been trying that and it changed nothing on my site so I skipped it and tried to do other things to change it. When you told me that’s all you did, I started to play around with that section and use left: -5em and such and then it finally started to show up. For some reason 0em; was not sitting flush. But your post gave me ideas on how to change it and now I have it shifted down and left to fit exactly as I want it. Of course I had to do two separate files for it to appear the same in IE6 and then for IE7.

            But this helped alot! Thanks!