Menu Autopilot

Menu Autopilot turns Drupal navigation into an automatic, content-driven system. Curate your top-level menu the way you always have, then let each item's children build and maintain themselves from your published content. Publish a new product, article, or landing page and it appears in the right menu automatically; unpublish it and it disappears. No more hand-editing menus to mirror your content.

It is to navigation what Pathauto is to URL aliases: the automatic, config-driven default.

The problem

Drupal's menus are hand-curated. On content-heavy or decoupled sites, editors spend real time redoing navigation to match content, and in a headless build a hand-placed link is easy to point at the wrong URL. Existing taxonomy-menu modules generate menu items from terms; none generate items from content nodes under a curated parent with clean, headless-ready URLs. Menu Autopilot fills that gap.

What it does

• Hybrid menus. You curate the top level; each item can auto-populate its children from published content.
• You choose the source, per item: a taxonomy term, a content type, or a hand-picked ordered list of nodes.
• Always in sync. Children are created, updated, reordered, reparented, and removed automatically as content is published, unpublished, retyped, or deleted.
• Headless-clean URLs. Generated links use canonical entity references, so they resolve to your real path alias, never /node/123 or an editorial route.
• Multilingual. Synced links are translatable and language-aware.
• Accessible by design, built to power a fully keyboard-navigable, WCAG 2.1 AA menu.

Decoupled or traditional

Menu Autopilot produces ordinary menu links, so the composed tree is exposed by any consumer, whether GraphQL (GraphQL Compose), JSON:API, or a classic Drupal theme, with no extra work, and it fans cache-tag revalidation to your decoupled front end. There is nothing to teach your API layer.

Quick start

1. Install and enable the module.
2. Edit a top-level menu link, open Automatic children, and choose a source.
3. Publish content and it appears under that item. Run drush menu-autopilot:rebuild to reconcile at any time.

Requires Drupal 10.3+ or 11. Maintained by Jeremy Michael Cerda and Wilkes & Liberty, LLC.