Someone please point the out if any of this is wrong. (see previous post on needing more documentation in KAction, etc) To have a menu that is partially static and partially dynamic ( my example being in my im client there is a menu that lists away messages. Users can add and remove away messages from this list as will is that dynamic part and the static part is an action to add new messages. ) you can not layout this menu using xmlui and KActions. Currently the only way to do it is to make an action (that is a KActionMenu) and fill it in manually within the code of the app. I have been able to come up with 2 ways to get access to a menu and using the ui.rc The first is a call to the guiFactory, which will return a KPopupMenu for example: (KPopupMenu *)guiFactory()->container("away_menu", this); This solution allows you to use the ui.rc file to manage the menu, but doesn't allow you to add/remove KActions to the menu, only normal KPopupMenu stuff. The second is to create a KActionMenu in place of the entire submenu in the ui.rc file and within the code creat all of the KAction's (for that menu) and manually enter them into said KActionMenu. You have control of where the menu goes via the ui.rc file, but not control the placement of the items in the menu in the ui.rc file. From what I can gather when the ui.rc file is parsed it doesn't make KActionMenu's, but in fact just makes KPopupMenu's where a