I am working with SharePoint 2010. I am looking for creating a custom menu that could be placed on Master page of my site collection. Could you please give me a start on this. I don't want to use existing menus on default master page. I would rather like to have my own master page with my custom menu links with sub menus.
A basic idea would be that I will have a XML file with menu items defined I want to give liberty to the user to make changes to XML file somehow that add/edit or remove the links. Also I want the menu to be user role based (Items could be disabled for unauthorized users).