News

Announcing Menu Autopilot

A free, open-source Drupal module for hybrid navigation: curate your top-level menu and let each item's children build and maintain themselves from published content, with clean, headless-ready URLs.
— July 12, 2026
Topics:Navigation & IA
Tags:Drupal

We've released Menu Autopilot, a free and open-source Drupal module that brings hybrid navigation to Drupal: curate your top-level menu by hand and let each item's children build and maintain themselves from published content. It is to navigation what Pathauto is to URL aliases, and it's available now on drupal.org.

Why we built it

Drupal's menus are hand-curated. On a content-heavy or decoupled site, that means editors are forever rebuilding the navigation to mirror the content — and a hand-placed link is easy to point at the wrong URL. The existing "taxonomy menu" modules generate menu items from taxonomy terms; none generate menu items from content nodes under a curated parent with clean, headless-ready URLs.

We hit that gap building the decoupled platform behind wilkesliberty.com — right down to a live bug where a menu link pointed at an editorial route (/node/107/latest) that the front end rendered as a dead URL. Rather than patch one site, we built the fix as a reusable module and gave it back to the community.

What Menu Autopilot does

  • Hybrid menus. You curate the top level; each curated item can auto-populate its children from published content.
  • Editor picks the source, per item. A taxonomy term, a content type, or a hand-picked ordered list of nodes.
  • Always in sync. Children are created, re-titled, re-ordered, and pruned automatically as content is published, updated, unpublished, or re-typed — via an idempotent diff that never churns links, and only ever touches links it created.
  • Headless-clean URLs. Generated links use canonical entity references (entity:node/<id>), so they resolve to your real path alias — never /node/N or an editorial route. It even ships a normalizer to clean up legacy links.
  • Decoupled-ready and accessible. It produces real menu_link_content links, so GraphQL Compose, JSON:API, or a traditional theme all see the composed tree with no extra work — and the documented front-end pattern is a WCAG 2.1 AA keyboard-navigable Disclosure Navigation.

Get it

Menu Autopilot runs on Drupal 10.3+ or 11. Install it with Composer:

composer require drupal/menu_autopilot

Contributions are welcome, and the module is released under the GPL-2.0-or-later license. For the full picture, read the open-source overview Menu Autopilot and the engineering whitepaper Composing Navigation in a Headless CMS.