An interesting Joomla menu problem

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Posted: March 27, 2009
Earlier today I was working on a site with a single menu in the Menu Manager. That menu was split into a top navigation (the top level items) which would be image-based navigation (don't ask) and the left navigation would show the secondary and tertiary levels of nav, in the standard text format.

There were two templates on the site: a home page and an inside page.

There was one module running the primary nav everywhere, and the secondary nav modules changed with the section of the site.

So I was really surprised to see the main nav working on the home page -- you could see the images just fine -- but on most inside pages, the main nav bar wasn't visible because the images weren't displaying. Taking a peek at the source code, the images weren't even being written to the page!

I called Bill, and we spent 30 minutes investigating this problem using a variety of techniques. (The good news, at least for me, was that Bill didn't have the answer right away! It was a real stumper of a question.)

What Bill eventually realized is that if the secondary navigation was displaying on the page, the main nav would not display. Upon investigating the module settings, the secondary nav modules had the setting for "show menu images" set to "no". Changing this setting to "yes" caused the main navigation bar to show once again.

Like most settings in Joomla, it seems that these are cascading. Because the secondary nav bar was set to show no images, the main nav bar showed no images. The menu items are contained in separate modules, but they originate from the same menu bar.

We aren't sure if this is a feature or a bug, so do watch your menu settings in Joomla!