Side menu subitems issue

I'm having a slight problem with setting up a side menu.

The current structure
I have a bunch of categories which are subitems of the main menu. To make it clear here's an example of said structure.

Home
- home sub1
- home sub2
News
- news category sub1
- news category sub2

In my menu on the side I want to show only the subitems of the parent
So on the news page the submenu would be
news category sub1
news category sub2

This works just fine if I set "Sub items dependant of active parent" to "Yes"

The problem
The problem with this is that these sub items show a blog view of several articles and when I click one of them (and thus go to the article view) the side menu dissapears since the active parent changed.
But I want it to stay there, so people can go back to the blog view of a specific news category.


Another thing I tried is setting the "Sub items dependant of active parent" to "No" and then setting the "start" and "end" level to "1" But then the menu shows "home sub1" and "home sub2" aswel which is something I don't want.


The solution would be either one of these following:

Solution 1) When a menu is set to show depending on parent, allow an option to also show it when it goes further down the menu structure.

Example

Menustructure:
Home
-sub1
>-subsub1
>-subsub2
-sub2
-sub3

would show the menu
-sub1
-sub2
-sub3

Even if it's on the subsub1 or subsub2 page



Solution 2) Allow the menu to show a start and end level from 1 specific menuitem.

Example:

Menustructure:
Home
homesub1
homesub2
News
newssub1
newssub2

Set it to show "start" and "end" level "1" of menu item "News";
would show the menu
newssub1
newssub2

I noticed that if I use a regular menu module it goes correctly. the only problem I have then is that the descriptions are shown aswel, so another solution would be to have a quick fix to remove / hide the description from a regular menu module.

hi
which version of joomla are you using ?

I think I have to change this because you are not the first with this particular issue....grrr

Hey,

Thanks for looking into this.

Forgot to mention this indeed.
I am using Joomla 1.7

This is my first post so thank you very much for your good work.

I have the same problem in Joomla 1.7.1. I try to show sub-items from the active parent only but I can't. It shows all sub-items, from active parent and the others.

Thank you again and regards!

this will be updated soon... I hope before the end of the week