Currently, Drupal's menu system does not provide granular permissions for managing menu items within a specific menu. Users with the "Administer menus and menu items" permission can create, edit, and delete any menu item, but there is no way to restrict these actions separately.
For example, in Taxonomy, we can define separate Create, Edit, and Delete permissions per vocabulary (e.g., "Tags: Create terms", "Tags: Edit terms", "Tags: Delete terms"). A similar approach for menus would provide better control over user roles and content management workflows.
Current workaround
Some contributed modules, like
Simple Menu Permissions →
, attempt to solve this problem by offering more granular menu permissions. However, this functionality should ideally be available in Drupal Core to provide a consistent and reliable solution without requiring third-party modules.
Introduce separate Create, Edit, and Delete permissions for menu items per menu, similar to taxonomy term permissions per vocabulary. This would allow:
The Permissions page (admin/people/permissions) will have new entries under the Menu module:
"Create menu items in [Menu Name]"
"Edit menu items in [Menu Name]"
"Delete menu items in [Menu Name]"
No new terminology introduced; just extended permission granularity for menu items.
New permission keys in the permissions system for menus.
Possible updates to menu-related APIs to check for specific permissions instead of a single "administer" permission.
Active
11.1 🔥
menu system
Changes are made on on 11.x (our main development branch) first, and are then back ported as needed according to the Core change policies → .
There are existing issues about improving the permissions for menus. It would help to add those as related and to ensure there are no duplicates.
Updating tags per issue tag guidelines → . This is already in the 'menu system' component