Drupal's main-menu not displaying

Question

I've started my first custom theme and I pulled the main-menu print statement from the default page.tpl but it didn't display. Curiously, if I create a region and add the main menu to that region via the blocks administration it will show up. Why won't this show when hard-coded?

<?php if ($main_menu || $secondary_menu): ?>
  <div id="navigation"><div class="section">
    <?php print theme('links__system_main_menu', array('links' => $main_menu, 'attributes' => array('id' => 'main-menu', 'class' => array('links', 'inline', 'clearfix')), 'heading' => t('Main menu'))); ?>
    <?php print theme('links__system_secondary_menu', array('links' => $secondary_menu, 'attributes' => array('id' => 'secondary-menu', 'class' => array('links', 'inline', 'clearfix')), 'heading' => t('Secondary menu'))); ?>
  </div></div> <!-- /.section, /#navigation -->
<?php endif; ?>

If I switch the theme over to Bartik, that uses the exact same print statement, the menu seems to work fine.

Answer 1

I spent countless hours figuring it out as well; the solution was so dumb simple !

Edit your theme's ".info" file and add :

features[] = main_menu
features[] = secondary_menu

Otherwise main_menu and secondary_menu doesn't display at all.

Hope that helps.