Improvement to menu href link generation logic

[Don Schoeman]

An improvement may need to be made to the mod_menu_a() function in the mods.php files under the themes files.

Lets give an example of the problem first:
Imagine you would like to create a new menu item called "Home". This menu item is not going to be placed somewhere in the menu's itself but is going to be a button somewhere on your page. So you are going to Hide it from the top menu. The "Home" menu also simply references/links to an existing menu, let's say "Dashboard". So the way you are going to configure the Home menu is:

1) Under Select Node Type: Set the menu to: (3) Jump to Link: Dashboard
2) Hide Menu: "From All" or "From Menu Only"

The problem comes in when you would like to render the a href tag for this link in your own theme. One would typically use the mod_menu_a() function in the mods.php file to do this. The problem is that mod_menu_a() thinks that this menu item is simply a place marker and therefore renders the <a href> tag as:
target="_self"
instead of rendering the real target for the menu.

The problem with this is that it is assumed that when a menu item is hidden from all, or from the menu itself, that it is a self referencing link and this may not always be the case. Of course one can simply change the mod_menu_a() function to suite your needs better but it takes a while for one to figure out what is going on and why your menu isn't working as it should. In my case for example I had to change the line:
if ($mr['menu_type'] == 6 || ($mr['hide'] != 0 && $mr['hide'] != 2))

to

if ($mr['menu_type'] == 6 || ($mr['menu_type'] != 3 && $mr['hide'] != 0 && $mr['hide'] != 2))

The question is, can mod_menu_a() be improved to handle this situation better by default or is it going to cause problems elsewhere?

[Don Schoeman (don.sch)]

If this is not going to break anything else I think the mod_menu_a() function could simply be changed to this (notice I removed the checks for hidden menu's on the 4'th line:

function mod_menu_a($mr, $class='')
{
 // Check if we have a place marker.
 if ($mr['menu_type'] == 6) {
  $noclick = 'onclick="return false;"';
  // Create URL.
  $url = "&#35;";
 } else {
  $noclick = '';
  // Last check if it is a link item that should be jumped to.
  if ($mr['menu_type'] == 5) {
   $url = $mr['menu_link'];
  } else {
   $url = $mr['href'];
  }
 }
 ($mr['new_window'] == 1) ? $target = '_blank' : $target = '_self';

 /**
  * Class types:
  * nav-grand
  * nav-parent
  * child
  */
 if (empty($class))
  $span = '';
 else
  $span = "<span class=\"{$class}\"></span>
  ";

 return "<a href=\"{$url}\" target=\"{$target}\" {$noclick}>
    {$span}{$mr['menu_name']}
   </a>
   ";
}