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I have a site that started its life in 1.7.0.  After upgrading to 1.7.3 I lost control of the order of menu items.   Numbering and saving didn't work.  Tweaking with the blue arrows only worked in some places, and then didn't seem to stick.  I "solved" the problem by using the MOVE function at the bottom of the menu items manager page, selecting an item and moving it to the same menu -- this would add it at the bottom of the list.   I repeated until all were in the order they had been in before the upgrade to 1.7.3.

Searching the joomla forum I found a few related posts in this thread:

http://forum.joomla.org/viewtopic.php?f=579&t=636152&p=2615670#p2615670

>>Infograf and I seem to have found the problem! It is a problem with JUpgrade - the column "ordering" in table "_menu" is filled with different numbers - it should be just zero's as the ordering of the menu items is drawn from the columns "lgt" and "rgt".

They then give the sql command to set all to zero.   I can't paste the code here just now.

Many in the forum were pointing at jUpgrade as the source of this problem and someone uploaded a mini component to do the above sql task.

I'm preparing a talk for JoomlaDay NYC on Alternative Layouts and Custom Menu Item Types.  There had been so many posts on the joomla.org forum about these new capabilites of Joomla 1.6 and 1.7,  and so many were complaining that the "feature" simply didn't work, I was getting a bit worried about the presentation.   I had proved them working back in the spring for a presenation at Joomla Day New England, but had things changed in the subsequent versions?

Finally last week I had a chance to put them all through their paces and the good news is that Alternative Layouts and Custom Menu Item Types DO indeed work --  for all kinds of Joomla items:   articles, contacts, weblinks, and category displays like blogs and lists.

The ONE Joomla entity where my template overrides (which worked) could not be turned into Alternative Layouts OR  Custom Menu Item Types  was the com_content layout for Categories.