TYPO3 Core

Just had the same problem and wrote a patch for it - please check if this works for you.

added a new version of the patch, as the first patch had some side-effects with ACT state in some rare occasions. Now only the CUR state is fixed for pages of type shortcut which is also the solution for this BT entry.

Just a copy of my DEV-list post:

If this is the current behaviour, then this is definitely a bug but not for
the reasons you mentioned.

A shortcut should IMHO never show it's own URL but always the URL it has
been pointing to.
If (like in your example) page 4 is a shortcut to page 3, then the URL
should clearly state that and show http://blah.tld/index.php?id=3 - even the
link itself should be the same. Meaning: No redirect after clicking on the
link but a rewrite of the link before it is delivered to the browser. This
way you wouldn't even get the dreaded "double content".

According to that behaviour, all item states should be exactly the same the
user would have expected to be shown when directly clicking on the menulink
of the target page itself. After all page 4 is just a shortcut and thus
can't be ACTive or CURrent by definition and IMHO the user should be
informed about that behaviour.

So the item states are already fine but the URL is not.

Patch set 1 of change I58b731ba6d86a2f64ebcd958ae9cd120238d2e92 has been pushed to the review server.
It is available at http://review.typo3.org/2486

IMHO it's confusing that a menu item is not highlighted, after clicking it. Especially when you have things like a Home-Shortcut to the parent page, there's no automatic way to highlight it.

The problem is that there will be two highlighted menu items as soon as you have one page in the menu point to another page in the menu.
So highlighting a shortcut will only work without additional confusion, when you point from a menu page to another page outside the menu.

In my opinion, also the shortcut page is active: You are exactly on that page, to which the menu entry will lead you, if you hit it again.

Usually there is no need for a shortcut pointing to the root page, since this page already exists and can be easily used within a menu by
a) setting up a HMENU of the type list properly by including the rootpage to the list or
b) using a COA to put a link in front of the "real" menu entries

And if you insist on using a shortcut, you should actually do it the other way around: Make ROOT a shortcut pointing to HOME, which would be CUR by definition then.
Using a shortcut from HOME to ROOT for this purpose is no good idea at all.

And since we are at it: Actually the ROOT page should be ACTive when you are on any page in the rootline.

ROOT (ACT)
HOME
PAGE 2 => you are here (CUR)

So following your logic IMHO the HOME page should be ACTive as well in this case, since you want it to reflect the state of the page it is pointing to.

IMHO it will only add to the confusion if we will be going to change the current shortcut behaviour.