Main Navigation Menu: Throwing out the old and making a new

Question

I've fought blood, tooth, and nail with the built in Main Menu in Drupal 7, and finally I've given up.

What I've done instead is implemented a block which I've placed into the Main Navigation area, and used pure CSS to control the menu. So far, I think it looks and works great.

There's only a few problems:

The company which I am writing this site for has a few users with administrative privileges whom only have a very small and limited knowledge of HTML.

I've installed the CKEditor (WYSIWYG HTML editor) module for the blocks, which has made everything much easier for them, but whenever they edit the raw HTML for the menu (which they don't like doing) this editor removes all of the CSS classes from the menu and destroys it.

Also, because of my block approach to the menu, they don't have the very nice Configure Links page that you would have with the built in menu.

What I would like to do:

I would like to make a new menu module which will work like the built-in Main-Menu, yet not extend it (I've tried both Superfish and NiceMenus, both of which extend the built-in menu, essentially inheriting all of its bugs).

I would like to make a Configure Links Administrative Page that will allow an administrator to configure the links as you would for the built-in main menu.

My Question:

Does anyone know how to view the source for the Main-Menu module, or if a replacement Main-Menu module exists that I can cut and hack apart?

So far, I haven't been able to find any of the source for the Main-Menu module or any replacements. I've only found extension modules like Superfish and NiceMenus.

If nothing exists yet, would anyone be able to point me in the direction of where to start, or (this may be too much to ask) walk me through how to do it and work on this project with me? I am very new to Drupal (I didn't know what it was two months ago) yet I have some extensive knowledge in software engineering.

I understand this has been tried several times, and proposed several times, yet I've not been finding any follow-ups to these questions. I thought this post might have been helpful, but I felt like I was just running in circles after reading it...

Thanks for the help everyone! I'll be looking forward to your responses!

Answer 1

Search for a module called nice menus.

Another option is to create a custom block and inside it query the db yourself for the main menu links. You can also add the contextual list links button to your block.

Answer 2

Is it possible that you're using CKE v.4 and ACF is enabled? If so, unless you've registered the classes in cke-styles.js (or whatever its called) the Advanced Content Filter will strip them out.