- Navigate to the backend of the system (e.g.
http://curatorexample.com/backend). - Navigate to the Curator > Settings > Portal Settings section from the left-hand menu and click the “Styles” tab.
- Expand the “Menu Options” section and select your menu using the Main Menu dropdown.
- Navigate to the backend of the system (e.g.
http://curatorexample.com/backend). - Navigate to the Curator > Settings > Users > Frontend Group Overrides section from the left-hand menu.
- Click on the Group Override you would like to modify or click the “New Group Override” button at the top to create a new override.
- Click the “Styles” tab,
- Choose your overridden Main Menu Main Menu dropdown.
Understanding “Orphaned Items” Placeholder Menus
Curator stores your navigation as a tree, and every menu item records which menu it sits beneath. If that parent record goes missing — for example it was removed by a database restore, a partial import, or a deletion that left its children behind — the items underneath it would have nothing to attach to and would drop out of the navigation tree. To prevent that, Curator looks for menu items whose parent no longer exists and recreates the missing parent as a placeholder titled Orphaned Items, Menu #:<id>, where <id> is the ID of the menu that went missing. The
affected items stay nested underneath it, so they remain visible and editable in the backend.
This check is queued each time you open a page under Content > Navigation and then runs as a background job, so
the placeholder generally appears within a minute rather than instantly. An “Orphaned Items” menu appearing is
expected behavior rather than an error: it means the parent record was already gone, and Curator recovered the items
instead of losing them.
The placeholder is recreated using the missing menu’s original ID, and that matters for what your end users see.
Curator resolves your Main Menu by looking for a menu with the configured ID, and only checks that such a menu exists
— not whether it is top-level or attached to anything else. So if the missing ID is still the one selected as your
site’s Main Menu (Portal Settings > Styles), or as a Frontend Group Override’s Main Menu, the placeholder
immediately takes that role and its contents appear in the navigation on the frontend. If that ID is not selected as
a Main Menu anywhere, the placeholder sits at the top level of the tree and stays out of the frontend navigation
until you move it — or its items — beneath the menu you have selected as your Main Menu.
Deleting the placeholder on its own does not resolve the situation. While its items still point at the missing parent
ID, Curator recreates the placeholder the next time the check runs, which is why the same “Orphaned Items” entry can
reappear after you remove it.
To Resolve an “Orphaned Items” Menu:
- Navigate to the backend of the system (e.g.
http://curatorexample.com/backend). - Navigate to the Content > Navigation section from the left-hand menu and expand the “Orphaned Items” entry to review which menu items are nested beneath it.
- Navigate to the Content > Reorder Navigation section and drag each of those items to the location you want them in, beneath a menu that still exists.
- Return to Content > Navigation and delete the now-empty “Orphaned Items” placeholder. With nothing referencing the missing menu ID any more, it will not be recreated.