Drupal 6.x Drop-down menu

For the second time, I was tasked with setting-up a down-down menu in Drupal for the Primary Links. I don’t recall struggling last time, but this time it took a while until I could get it to render properly. I checked the old code, and the menu was shown using the Primary Links block. Instead of adding in blocks and doing it the same way, I thought I could make a few small adjustments to the theme’s template.php

The issue was

1. The main list needed an id to send to the drop-down config
2. The child items needed to appear as a sub menu (ul)

Using the $primary_links variable in page.tpl.php doesn’t include the child items, even when Expanded is selected in the Drupal menu config. I tried a number of different theme functions, but nothing seemed to work. What did work finally was calling from the page.tpl.php

print theme('menu_tree','primary-links');

For the id, I used the template.php function:

function phptemplate_menu_tree($tree) {
  $id=strpos($tree,'href="/"')!==FALSE?' id="primarylinks"':'';
  return '<ul class="menu menulist" '.$id.'>'. $tree .'</ul>';
}

There’s probably a better way to do it, but that’s how I got the id for the main menu set to primarylinks, and default for the child menus.

Acknowledgment:  DHTML / JavaScript Menu by TwinHelix Designs