Concepts

cakephp-menu cleanly separates three concerns. Keeping them apart is what makes the same menu definition reusable across requests, roles, and output formats.

1. Build

You declare what is in the menu — a tree of items, each with a label, an optional link, and optional metadata (icons, badges, data). Building is request-agnostic: no knowledge of the current URL, the logged-in user, or the eventual markup. You can build in code, or import a tree with Menu::fromArray() (config) or Menu::fromFlat() (database rows).

2. Resolve

Resolvers apply per-request state onto the built tree — which item is active, which branch is an ancestor of the active item, and which items are visible to the current user. The helper applies URL resolvers automatically; you compose additional ones (login, permission, authorization, callback) on top. Resolution mutates runtime state only, so the same menu can be re-resolved for a different request.

3. Render

Renderers turn the resolved tree into output — HTML for one of the bundled renderers (string template, Bootstrap 5, navbar, sidebar, breadcrumb) or a JSON payload. A renderer never decides active state or visibility; it only reflects what resolution already decided.

Core types

Type	Role
Menu	The root container and a submenu node. Holds items and HTML attributes; the entry point for building, resolving, and serializing.
Item	A single entry: label, link, metadata (icon, badge, data), and an optional submenu. Carries active/visible/expanded runtime state.
Link	The URL of an item — a string, a CakePHP route array, or external — plus link attributes. Resolved to a string via the Router at render time.
Resolver	A strategy that sets active state and/or visibility on items. Compose several with ResolverCollection.
Renderer	A strategy that converts a (resolved) menu to a string. Swap it per render() call.

TIP

The Menu helper ties these together: register()/create() to build, and render() to resolve (URL resolvers automatically) and render in one call. See Getting Started.