How to set paths for menu items in hierarchy to make it work with Superfish I'm confused about what to do with the menu items whose sole function is 'to be parent' i.e. no content attached to them. One way I wanted to solve this is to set the path to &lt;front&gt; for those items. But then subitems just won't fly out anymore. 

Similarly, if I set the path of a parent item to the node that belongs to a child item, the parent just totally disappears out of the menu, leave alone that there would be a child to pop out of.
Weirdly enough I've just stumbled across the Special menu items module, which is:

a Drupal module that provides placeholder and separator menu items.
A placeholder is a menu item which is not a link. It is useful with dynamic drop down menus where we want to have a parent menu item which is not linking to a page but just acting as a parent grouping some menu items below it.

I'm pretty sure that's just what you're looking for, and it has a stable release for Drupal 7 :)