How to combine two menu's in Drupal

Question

I'm building a site with 2 menu's. One is the main menu, the other one is similar to the user menu.

The user menu is only displayed in a panel on the frontpage, the main menu is always visible. To keep the user-menu options available I'd like to add them to the main menu as well so they are always accessible too.

I thought of appending the user-menu to the main-menu in my custom template.php like below, but that gave me just the main-menu.

function THEME_preprocess_page(&$variables) {
  $variables['main_menu'] = array_merge(menu_main_menu(), menu_navigation_links('menu-myoptions'));
}

I was using the main-menu-block, so I thought that could be the reason the altered menu is not showing up. (The block might load the menu directly). But when I user render($main_menu) in my page.tpl.php it doesn't work eighter.

Am I missing something?

Answer 1

Instead you can try this Advanced Menu module, Menus can now be merged into other menus. This allows users with the appropriate permission to add links to other menus which are then displayed as if there were a single menu.

Example:

Create new role "News Manager"

Create new user "News Editor"

Create new menu "News Releases", Set "News Manager" as an editor for the menu.

Answer 2

I ended up using Menu Minipanels.

A system for building "megamenu" -style dropdown menus using Mini Panels, which provides tremendous flexibility in what can be displayed.

Click-by-click beginner's tutorial: http://drupal.org/node/984560#comment-3922442

It allowed to me to create a panels lay-out and place the menu-blocks I wanted in there. To front-end users it looks like it is one menu.