Description of the need
Follow-up to https://github.com/backdrop/backdrop-issues/issues/2782 and https://github.com/backdrop/backdrop-issues/issues/5397.
Menu items have forever had the vague "Expanded" option, which affects the display of menu links when displayed in a hierarchical tree. Note that the "Expanded" option does not affect the drop-down menu display and can also be overridden using the "Show all menu links" option.
Proposed solution
Instead of having "Expanded" options at the menu link level, which only applies in very specific situations, move the settings for expanding menu links to the block level, and only show this setting when using the "Hierarchical Tree" display option:

The obvious downside of this approach would be that if you place the same menu block in multiple places on the site, you would need to reconfigure the list of expanded links multiple times, unless you used a contrib module like mini_layouts to reuse the same block configuration across multiple layouts.
Recent comments
I second this-- I have a module in contrib now that I just marked as "deprecated", and I removed its sole alpha release (because a fix in Core made it obsolete). Just plain deleting the module...
Weekly Meetings July 23rd 2026
If there's some time left in the dev meeting - although it might rather be a topic for the PMC: We have nice documentation and procedures, how to provide projects in backdrop-contrib space...
Weekly Meetings July 23rd 2026
The need for a clear AI policy is growing. Please can this be a priority.
Weekly Meetings July 23rd 2026