So, I did this maybe a week or two weeks ago, but it was a great victory for science and metagenomics, and I figured I'd post it here. I finally got dropdown menus working in Joomla, guys! Yayyyyyyy. If you go to phantome.org and mouse over the tools menu bar, you'll get the condensed effort of my AWESOME work. Really, all it boils down to was I needed to click a single button.
Building dropdown menus, or "submenus" in Joomla is not terribly advanced. You make an item in whatever menu you're working on, in this case the main menu. But instead of its parent being "Top" you make the parent an already existing item in the menu, in this case "Tools".
However, unless you use my SECRET TRICK, the menu will only ever appear if you're on the "Tools" page already. Which is dumb. People don't want a menu for what they're already looking at. So after a few hours of googling, downloading extensions and modules I didn't need, and then a lot of clicking, I found the answer!
Edit the module for your menu, in my specific case I go to Extensions->Module Manager-> Main Menu in the administrator backend. Then you click the simple little box labeled "Always Show Sub-menu Items", and save your changes. Voila! Success, and awesome. You now have infinite dropdown power. You can have dropdown menus, you can have dropdown menus inside those dropdown menus. Those menus can then shack up and raise little menus of their own. You can have nothing but menus, if you wanted. Infinite menus, dropping down.
Joomla is pretty cool, provided you step into a ring and box with it for like, nine hours.
I just used it for a new site I'm building.