The ability to have images as menu items sounds like a common and straight forward task. Surprisingly, Drupal never has had this ability built into core, but there are a few modules that will help us accomplish our goal. Sprite Graphic Menu is probably the easiest one to use and the one that will be covered in this article.
It is possible to write some custom code using regex in your template.php which could parse the title field of a menu item to look for image filename extensions and then alter the menu output to print that menu item as an image. But wouldn't it be nice if a module could extend the current menu system and provide an image upload field. Even better, how about some CSS options to provide our own sprite background positioning. This is exactly what Sprite Graphic Menu does for us.
The current process is a bit janky and will hopefully be improved. Example: You will not see the image upload field when first creating a menu item. You must create the menu item and then edit it, then the image upload and configuration options will be displayed on the form.
