Drupal 7: How to insert site's Main Menu and also use my custom style on it?

Question

I've a menu like this-

<!-- Main Menu -->
<ul class="nav sf-menu clearfix">
    <li><a href="about.html">About Us</a></li>
    <li><a href="index.html">Artists</a><em></em></li>
    <li class="sub-menu"><a href="index.html">Works</a><em></em>
    <ul>
            <li><a href="#">Dolore ipsu</a></li>
            <li class="sub-menu"><a href="#">Consecte</a>
            <ul>
                    <li><a href="#">Dolore ipsu</a></li>
                    <li><a href="#">Consecte</a></li>
                    <li><a href="#">Elit Conseq</a></li>
            </ul>
            </li>
            <li><a href="#">Elit Conseq</a></li>
    </ul>
    </li>
    <li><a href="index.html">Blog</a><em></em></li>
    <li><a href="contact.html">Contacts</a><em></em></li>
</ul>
<!-- End Main Menu -->

There's a whole section of CSS style information for that plain HTML section. I've tried to add the site's Main Menu to page.tpl but it isn't showing up When I add the following PHP code-

<?php
    $menu = menu_navigation_links('menu-main-page');
    print theme('links__menu_main_page', array('links' => $menu));
?>

What am I doing wrong here?

Also when it DOES show up, I'd like to which elements are printed exactly when trying to include the menu and how to assign the generated ul / li to some classes, as required for the CSS to apply style to those elements?

Answer 1

In Bartik, menu is added like that:

    <?php if ($main_menu): ?>
      <div id="main-menu" class="navigation">
        <?php print theme('links__system_main_menu', array(
          'links' => $main_menu,
          'attributes' => array(
            'id' => 'main-menu-links',
            'class' => array('links', 'clearfix'),
          ),
          'heading' => array(
            'text' => t('Main menu'),
            'level' => 'h2',
            'class' => array('element-invisible'),
          ),
        )); ?>
      </div> <!-- /#main-menu -->
    <?php endif; ?>

Except the fact that $main_menu was not provided in page.tpl.php nor in template.php, apparently created by menu module, it looks like your code, just more elaborate. This indicates that either in menu_navigation_links or in theme you passed an argument that happens not to work. Except that it should be all right. Use dpr() or var_dump() to see which one fails.

If you need better control over your menus, I suggest using Menu block module to put them. This module allows you to treat menus or their parts as a blocks, so in your template all you need to do is to output proper region.

To get classes on menu items, you can simply use Menu attributes module:

The module currently allows you to set the following attributes for each menu item:

• Id
• Name
• Target
• Rel
• Class
• Style
• Accesskey