Behaviour when deleting menu items with sub-menus

[johnbillion]

If you delete a menu item that has sub-menu items below it, the sub-menu items will move up a level instead of being deleted. I don't think this is desired behaviour for menus. If I delete a menu I expect it to delete all its sub-menus too.

Additionally, the "sub item" labels on sub-menus are not removed as they should be when they're moved up a level, which adds to the confusion (see attached screenshots).

[johnbillion]

Before screenshot

[johnbillion]

After screenshot

[DrewAPicture]

I believe the desired behavior is to delete that one menu item and nothing more. The answer would be the same if we were talking about pages or even categories too.

As for removing the 'sub item' label when sub-emnu items shift down to top-level, that seems like a legitimate bug we should fix.

[DaveAl]

While looking at this, I noticed a couple of other things that I think are worth mentioning.

Although maybe it's intentional, if you add a new page and set it's parent attribute, it shows up on the menu page in the "Most Recent" tab correctly under it's parent, but when you add it to the menu, it's inserted at the same level as it's parent, with no "sub item" label. Furthermore, if you click on the "Under [Parent] Page" link, nothing happens unless you save the menu first.

Nothing major, but rather counter-intuitive - it took a few tries for me to figure out that's how it works. It seems to me that:

1. The new item should be inserted at the next level under it's parent by default and -
2. You should be able to move the item before saving it the first time.

[mordauk]

I'm not sure if there is a related ticket opened for it, but I'd consider this to be the same kind of odd behavior that we see when adding multiple pages to a menu. Say you select three pages to add and two of them are child pages of he first. You'd expect all three pages to be added as a hierarchy (the second and third being set as sub menu items of the first), but instead they all get added as top level menu items.

[karmatosed]

I agree that this is an issue and would suggest it was fixed for 4.9.

[JoshuaWold]

If you delete a menu item that has sub-menu items below it, the sub-menu items will move up a level instead of being deleted.

I've validated that this behavior is happening in Customizer, WordPress 4.8. GIF of the current process:

[Travel_girl]

I think if you delete the parent menu item, the subitems should not be delete automatically, but should get a level higher and not being a submenu anymore.

If you add multiple pages, where you have a parent page and child pages, it would be a nice behavior, if the hierarchy would also be automatically in the menu, because you add them together.

I'm not so sure, about that same behavior, if you add the child-page alone and not together with the parent page. It could be confusing, that the menu item jumps in a spot, on its own.

[wesselvandenberg]

Maybe it is an option to give the users the option to decide if they want to keep their submenu items and/or if they want to assign them to an other menu item.

[boemedia]

We discussed this ticket today at Nijmegen and we think deleting submenu-items by default is not recommended and probably too confusing for the user. Therefore we suggest maybe adding a tick box where people can choose to include/exclude submenu items on deletion.