Title: Custom menus (mostly for administrators!)
Course: Teaching with Moodle 2: Training, collaboration and reflection online > Section: What's new in Moodle 2!

Brief overview of custom menus

If you take a look at the purple bar at the top of this screen you will see the words 'South Devon College website' and 'Moodle community'.  This is the custom menu.

This menu appears on every page within Moodle and allows quick links to important or commonly accessed spaces within Moodle or outside of Moodle.

In some themes in Moodle 1 it was possible to create a menu that would appear on the home page or throughout the site.  This menu enables you to quickly access other spaces within Moodle, or outside Moodle, without having to move into other spaces of Moodle first.

Custom menus are now a core element of Moodle 2 and any administrator can add and amend these without any technical knowledge.

The custom menu can either be a single link (like the South Devon College website option in the course menu above) or it can be a drop down list containing multiple links (which can be seen with the Moodle community option in the course menu).

It can be used to provide links to college services, study resources and other college systems that staff and students need to use.

To customise and add your own custom menus....

.. you need to be an administrator.  The option can be found in..

- Site administration
- Appearance
- Themes
- Theme settings

Scroll down the page and you will see a custom menu items box.  This is where you add the details of the menus that you would like.

To create a direct link on your menu you write the name / title that you want to appear on the menu and then add a pipe character (|) followed by the required hyperlink.

To create a drop down list, type the name / title you want to appear on the menu and press enter.  Add a hyphen (-) followed by the first option you want in the drop down list.  At the end of this first item add a pipe (|) and then the hyperlink.  Press enter and add another hyphen (-) and repeat this for each option in the drop down list.

It is usually easier to see this in practice so below is the custom menu that you can see at the top of this page shown as it is written in the custom menu items area in the administration settings.

South Devon College website|http://www.southdevon.ac.uk
Moodle community|http://moodle.org
-Moodle free support|http://moodle.org/support
-Moodle development|http://moodle.org/development
--Moodle Tracker|http://tracker.moodle.org
--Moodle Docs|http://docs.moodle.org
-Moodle News|http://moodle.org/news