drupal 7 parent menu item will not hide for authenticated user

Question

Could any one give me some ideas on what i need to check please?

I wish i could just show the site, but of course it' for my company, so I can't, but I have a menu bar at top of my page home, contact, meet the authors, books;

Under "Meet the authors", i have several authors, I created an authors content type and have one for each author. When you hover over "Meet the Authors" you see the drop-down list/sub-menus of the authors - only five of them now.

so using panels and views, when you click of "meet the authors" you see a list of the authors on the page and can click in for more detail.

Using the access control module, I only want this link to appear for anonymous users, once logged-in, this link should disappear but the link will not hide itself after login, but here is what's really odd, the sub-links which are the authors, those links/sub-menu do/does hide when the user logs in and only displays for the anonymous user

so for example, this enable menu should appear for the anonymous user

Meet the authors - ----Kim Fields - ----Tony Bruewer - ----Harris Carlton - ----John Brown

and should be completely hidden for the authenticated user, but what is happening though, upon login, the user sees the parent menu: Meet the authors

but the sub menus have hidden themselves as they should, i just can't get the parent menu to hide itself.

I have checked the access control to make sure I have selected things properly. I even created test content type and menus to test and everything worked, so I assume there is something different, but I just can't see what and where.

Any ideas and guidance would be greatly appreciated. Thank you.

Notes: the parent menu about [Meet the authors] is pointing to a panel page that contains a view to display the list of authors. I do not have access setting on the panel.

More Information: So for my own sanity, I slowly created another content type, a view for that content type and a panel page. Saved, cleared cache, ran cron. Change settings in control access module. Here is what I now see-- The sub-menus of the parent menu [Meet the authors]are following the authentication rule, the top menu just displays all the time. I create this mention from the Structure->Menus navigation. So the top menu item is pointing to the panel whereas the sub-menu items are actually the content types.

Still more Info: Here is what I think the issue that I still have not found a way around. I create the view, create the panel, place the view in the panel, give the panel page a normal menu entry. So that is my menu item that appears. If I click on that top parent link, it takes me to the panel with my view, but the menu item won't display/hide as needed. So i realized that the menu I am creating in the panel has nothing to do with the content type and the content type is needed to manage the access control module. So I go into my content type, change one of it's types and change the menu to point to the panel url I created. Well when I do that, that url is assigned to that content type node, not panel, but the menu item does, now, display/hide based on the selection from the access control module.

Can anyone give me a way around this? What i think I need is a way to point one of my node content types to the panel. Does this make sense. I love Drupal, but sometimes...

Answer 1

The easiest way with the least amount of programming would be do it with css:

body.logged-in .my-menu-name-or-css-class {
  display:none; 
}

The most standards compliant way would be to use hook_menu_alter and unset the menu if $user->uid returns true: https://api.drupal.org/api/drupal/modules%21system%21system.api.php/function/hook_menu_alter/7

However, in this case you're probably looking at maybe saving 10kb of bandwidth by unsetting the menu vs. just using CSS to hide it.

Answer 2

Ok, i finally resolved this issue, or figured out what is going on. This is a very specific issue, so posting my solution here, should someone else run into this exact problem.

Ok, so I am using panels in my sites, inside the panels, i have views based on the content types. My top level/parent menu item is pointing to the Panel that holds the View.

The menu item is NOT a menu created of/from the content type consequently, the "control access module" didn't do anything with the menu item, because it does not consider it a content type and that is actually correct.

So you know the saying "there's a module for that" -- there is a menu_per_role module that allowed me to update visibility based on user role, so I could hide that menu for the authenticated user.