Adding pages to menus could be more user friendly

[adampatterson]

It's difficult to find pages or visually see the page hierarchy when working with the site's menus.

Appearance / Menus

For a site that has a lot of content and multiple levels is hard to manage in the tiny Pages tab, it would be ideal if the height was adjustable.

Adding a page places the item at the bottom of the list where the user needs to manually move the item up the stack.

It would be ideal to drag the item from the Pages section into the menu.

Appearance / Customize / Menus
For some reason, this interface doesn't represent the page hierarchy making it hard to see the structure.

Same height restriction as above, there are only a small number of pages visible here making it hard to use with a lot of content.

The text input beside + Add makes me think that I can search the page list based on some interactions in the Appearance / Menus area.

It would be ideal to drag the item from the Pages section into the menu.

[SergeyBiryukov]

Hi there, welcome back to WordPress Trac! Thanks for the ticket.

[archduck]

The ability to collapse children (i.e. subpages) into their parents, such as "accordion" components do, would go a long way here to make menu management easier.

When adding a new page to a menu, the new menu item appears at the bottom of everything else, as the last menu entry, often out of sight, below the viewport. The only way to move it is via drag and drop. If it needs to be dropped somewhere near the top of the menu, you have to click, hold, drag the item to the top of the screen, and wait for the browser to scroll you there at the speed of a geriatric earthworm. If you let go too soon and you happen to be outside of a dropzone, you have to start over. And if there are multiple new menu items that need dragging, you’ll be holding down that mouse button a *lot*.

Consider instead a menu with collapsed top-level menu items. The new menu item is still added to the bottom, but it’s now much more likely to be in the viewport, so you can see it as it’s added - visual feedback that indicates the new page is now in the menu. Now, the target menu slot is much more likely to be within the viewport, even if it belongs near the top of the menu, and thus the dragging and dropping is much less likely to require any drag-scrolling at the screen edge. Hover the dragged item over the topmost ancestor of its target slot for 2000ms, and that section of the menu expands downward; repeat until the target slot is no longer collapsed, and drop.

The fundamental way of adding new menu items is exactly the same: the new item is added at the end of the menu and dragged into place. All that’s new is the accordion-like collapsing and expanding.

And as @adampatterson says, the hierarchy is hard to discern as it currently is. The ability to collapse child items into parent items would make it easier to see the main sections of menus at a glance.