Why can't I override my menu in Drupal 7 with theme_menu_tree? I'm working in drupal for the first time and I'm coming along nicely and learning as I go. I need to remove the UL and LI from my menu so I've been doing some research and "MYTHEME_menu_tree_menu_name" was suggested to override the container. As A test I'm trying this in my template.php file:

function storm_menu_tree__menu_social_media($variables) {
  return '&lt;span class="test-menu"&gt;' . $variables['tree'] . '&lt;/span&gt;';
}


Where "storm" is my theme name. My menu name is "Social Media" but D7 shows the machine name as "menu-social-media".

When I test this nothing is affected. What am I missing?

I should note this is a sub-theme based off Zen Theme.

--- edit ---

this is what I'm using to call the menu:

&lt;?php
$menu_name = 'menu-social-media';
$menu_id = 'social-media';
print theme('links', array('links' =&gt; menu_navigation_links($menu_name), 'attributes' =&gt; array('id' =&gt; $menu_id, 'role' =&gt; 'navigation', 'class'=&gt; array('links', 'inline'))));
?&gt;
Drupal 7 theme can implement a THEMENAME_menu_tree__MENU_NAME() or THEMENAME_menu_link__MENU_NAME() function to override theme_menu_tree() or theme_menu_link() for a specific menu.


References for overriding the specific menu:


https://gist.github.com/gagarine/3201854
https://gist.github.com/henrijs/6225177


Can you once try passing $variables as reference to the THEMENAME_menu_tree__MENU_NAME() as below:

function storm_menu_tree__menu_social_media($variables) {
  return '&lt;span class="test-menu"&gt;' . $variables['tree'] . '&lt;/span&gt;';
}


Note: Clear the cache after making the changes to the code in order to make sure implemented changes reflects on the site.