Panels, menus, and path in Drupal 6

Question

I'm trying to work on a site that's using Panels to, among other things, create a sidebar navigation menu. It's working well on a page that exists in the menu tree structure:

• Primary links
  • Info Page
    • One type of info
    • Another type of info
  • Updates
    • One category of updates
    • Another category of updates
  • Another page
    • With some subpages
    • Of its own

On the Updates the menu (correctly) appears as such:

• Info Page
• Updates
  • One category of updates
  • Another category of updates
• Another page

I want to create essentially the same structure, with only a selected part of the menu expanded, but on pages that are not themselves part of the menu structure (i.e. individual updates within the categories of updates). Ideally I'd like to do this based on the path alias or content type or something of that nature, so all updates show a menu with the whole updates category expanded (but not Info or Another)

How do I do this with Panels in 6.x?

Answer 1

I ended up doing this with the Menu Position module and Menu Blocks module as well as Panels.

1. Create a Menu Block with
   
   • Parent item:
     • Menu: Primary Links
     • Item: <root of primary links>
     • Starting level: 2nd level (secondary)
2. Create a Menu Position rule:
   • Content Types:
     • Update
   • Menu item:
     • Updates
3. Add your menu block as panels content (if desired) to the nodes of the desired type.