Drop down menu with only one item?

[stevish]

I don't know whether to label this as a defect or enhancement, but either way, I'm not sure if it will make the 2.7 release. I'll assume enhancement (even though it's leaning toward defect to me).

In the current version of 2.7, the Dashboard menu in the sidebar of the administration page only contains one item: Dashboard. Therefore, when you go to your dashboard, there are two links in your sidebar that say the same thing, link to the same place, and are one on top of the other. This seems redundant, and is a waste of space on the sidebar.

There should be code implemented that does away with the "Drop-down" part of a menu with only one item (since clicking on the menu title will take you there anyway). This way, a fresh install of WP will not have the useless dashboard menu taking up space, but as soon as the user installs Akistmet (or any other plugin that puts another menu item under dashboard menu), the menu will regain its drop-down-ability, accommodating the new menu item.

This could also apply to a top level menu added by a plugin that only has one item in it (even though creating such a menu would be frowned upon).

The new design eliminates some of the user experience reasons why this was needed. Now it's mainly a matter of the menu code being a colossal pain to fix.

I think we fixed the bugs preventing us from going forward. Attached patch removes requirement for a submenu from the menu code. Styling fixes needed now.

(In [9578]) Menu updates: single top level menus, B&W/color icons (sprite), fix for the Firefox bug of not firing mouseout on absolute positioned elements over textareas/text fields, scaling down properly for different user roles, includes patch by Ryan, fixes #7966

(In [9580]) Sort the menu before adding classes. see #7966

[9578] breaks top-level plugin menu

the changes in [9578] disappear the menu when you click on a top-level plugin menu . I tested three different plugins, to be sure. Checked with my plugin NextGEN-Gallery as well...

I didn't analyse very deep the function, but if I add the attched two lines, it will work again.

I don't see problems with NextGen-Gallery or any other plugins that add top levels. A screenshot and some browser info might help.

Menu failure with Firefox 3

Failure happend when you click on the plugin's menu, not before.
Then all elements dissapear... Tested with CformsII & NextGEN Gallery & WP-Email under Firefox 3 and IE7

Those all work fine for me. Clicked all top-levels and submenus. Any JS errors?

Nope, Firebug didn't show up anything...Strange, I tested it only under XAMPP (PHP 4.4.7), let me switch over to PHP 5 and check it again... as I said I can get it working when I add the two lines, so it's not a JS issue...

Yep, under PHP 5.2 it's working for me, PHP 4.4 not...

Switched to PHP4 and can reproduce the problem. Very strange.

Time to drop PHP 4 :-)

Looks like the internal loop counter is being stomped. Dropping the pass-by-ref to _wp_menu_output() fixes the problem.

(In [9598]) Don't pass menus by ref. Causes loop counter problems in php4. fixes #7966