Alternate solution to avoid handling a huge number of menu items I am on Drupal 7 and I am facing a dilemma with a project I am building. It will be a content-rich website, which means lots, lots, tons of articles. When user enters an article page, I want him to see the website area (menu item) it is associated with selected on top of the page. Drupal will handle it if the content is associated with the correct menu during node creation.

My concern is that I will have a huge menu page. When I have 1,000 articles or so, the menu admin page will be a terribly long list of articles associated with the top menus. I would rather have only the top two levels in my menu structure but I still need the subpages (articles) to be shown as associated with a menu item.

The question is: is it possible to associate a content type with a menu item so that it isn't actually in the menu, but it can interfere with the menu rendering so as to add ACTIVE or ACTIVE-TRAIL classes to the desired menu items? Do I have to play with template.php in order to achieve that?

Also, if you think that associating these many articles with a regular menu item is the correct approach and that there is no problem to end up with a monstrous menu list, please, tell me.

I am sorry if the question isn't enough clear, I will try to clarify further if necessary.
Context will handle it, but needs some template.php additions.

and it looks like Menu Position will too.