Big Menu

An alternative to core menu management - adds scalability to the admin menu management screen, by loading subtrees via AJAX.
(Not related to megamenu & similar display modules - this is an admin-only content management utility)

When dealing with a site menu that contains thousands of links, the Drupal Menu UI admin interface becomes so unwieldy as to be impossible to use. When the drag & drop functions for tree management are running, a page can take minutes to render.

THIS MODULE attempts to replace the all-in-one global tree view with a similar interface, but sub-trees are "collapsed" below a certain level, and can be expanded as needed.

Drag & drop between expanded and collapsed menus should be supported.

Known issue A conflict with jquery 1.4+ due to D6 core, so if you've used jquery_update, see the patch

REQUIRES Javascript enabled. Though a noscript fallback is actually available, it sorta defeats the purpose.
It (and Drupal) will not help much if your tree structure is 2 deep and a thousand wide. It should help if your tree is half a dozen deep and a dozen wide.

FEATURE

• Allows direct access to submenu sections of a big menu, so links within a section can be managed without loading the whole global menu.

CONFLICTS WITH

• tiny_menu. Appropriately enough.
• Jquery Update beyond 1.4. See the issue

COMPARE WITH

• Menu Browser [menuux] (tries to solve the in-page node edit form issue.)
• Or Hierarchical Select
• Menu Editor exposes all menu item values in one page directly. It won't help your scaling problems.

Drupal 7 Version

• Ported by acbramley
• Tested with core 7.38

Drupal 8 version

Available in alpha and working well, please file any bug reports in the issue queue.

See also Collapsible Drag 'n Drop (d8 new) which promises to do something similar. However, this seems to be an in-page visual effect only. Collapsible Drag 'n Drop does not actually address the problems of scaling and performance when there are hundreds of items, as it still loads the whole tree and form on the page each time, it just hides some of them afterwards to make it a little easier to navigate.

MOTIVATION

Original discussion : How to manage HUGE menus?