At present, no. no easier way. But if you wait for vB 4.2 there will be a navigation manager built in and it seems to work well.
How do I get started changing the default navbar, such as adding new menu items and connecting them to pages? I've been skimming many threads on this forum and all I see is people posting a lot of php code. Isn't there an easier way? Such as some sort of visual GUI editor, something like VC++ 2010 c++ IDE? I'm an old C/C++ programmer, but never dabbled into php or html until now. I miss the ease of using a visual editor to create/maintain the program windows/pages/skins. This reminds me of the old days in the 1980s when programmers had to write with standard text editors. We're in the 21st century now and vBulletin programming should move here too.
I would like to see a tutorial about how to do that. I bought the book "Building forums with vBulletin". It helped, but doesn't go far enough.
At present, no. no easier way. But if you wait for vB 4.2 there will be a navigation manager built in and it seems to work well.