puh. I think this was the third attempt I tried to fix this problem. Finally, it seems to work. As so often, the problem seems usual enough and one sometimes wonders that Drupal is not better with these very common things. But, let's be more concrete.
I have a site where I want to display news. News are classified in various categories using taxonomy terms. Now, I want these categories to appear in the menu and the menu items active when I see the posts. Just common-sense functionality, one would think.
I am sure there are different ways how to accomplish this with Drupal, but menu trails does NOT work. I ended up using taxonomy menu for part of the job. Since recently, this nice module populates the-menu-of-your-choice, but does not hamper anymore with the activity. (If I got it right, about the module history). Actually, that's fine and almost works on its own.
I make a new vocabulary for my news categories. (It still sucks that I cannot move my terms from one taxonomy to another, but this is not my topic here.) I add this vocabulary to my primary menu. Fine. In primary I have the vocabulary, in secondary the next level with the categories, like this
News
-my project news
-other projects
-site news
If I click on "News", the resulting page has News active. Right!
If I click on "other projects", the resulting page has "other projects" active. Right!
If I click on a specific posting with this taxonomy term, there is nothing active. NOT GOOD!
Googling brings me to menu trails. If have tried that before. I think, it works only for less levels menu. I finally find "Node breadcumb" and that saves my day. With it you can set up simple rules. I link the taxonomy term "news" with my menu item of the same name. I have to do it for all terms, but not for all posts! So only three times for my example. And I am done! Works intuitively.
Now, I should think that is could be done programmatically, but I don't need this right now!
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