WordPress Menu Management

This is a draft of a core idea on a tool for configuring and managing a WordPress navigation menu. My understanding is that this is a typical menu of either pages or categories that appears in the (or just below) header area. Following is a quote of the challenge as presented by Jane Wells:

Challenge #2: Better menu management. Right now the core development crew is working on a way to manage site menus from the admin. They started from existing plugins and widget code, and as a result, it could use some UI help. I don’t want people to start from scratch and submit their dream model, because there’s already work in progress. Just drop by the Trac ticket and provide UI feedback/suggestions.

After reviewing the Trac ticket and gaining some (hopefully relevant) perspective and inspiration from some mockups by Lari I put together this suggestion which is offered as a starting point for discussion (click on image to enlarge):

Basically the idea is to use existing capabilities from widget configurations to create a menu which can be populated by elements from the website:

• Elements can be dragged into the menu in any order
• Elements can be configured in the menu (in this wireframe a page can be given an alternate, for example, shorter name that better occupies a menu context).
• In time some elements may offer more advanced configurations. In this wireframe, one of the pages has sub-pages which can easily be added to the menu as sub-menu items.