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Working with MenuMachine and Dreamweaver

Article Applies To:

MenuMachine 1 & 2

GoLive CS, CS2

Mac, Windows

Article ID: 000157

Category: General Issues

Issue

Is there a way to use Dreamweaver to manage sites, yet still use MenuMachine to manage my menus? Will you be releasing a version of MenuMachine for Dreamweaver?

Solution

At this stage we do not have a version of MenuMachine that supports Dreamweaver. Given Adobe's increased focus on Dreamweaver it is likely that in the future this may change, however in the meantime you can use both GoLive and Dreamweaver to manage the same site. This allows you to edit your menus with MenuMachine yet still use Dreamweaver for page editing.

To manage a site in both GoLive and Dreamweaver so that you can use MenuMachine, you would do the following:

  1. Create a site in GoLive. This creates a site structure with a folder named "web-content" as the root directory of the site. If you already have a GoLive site, you may skip this step.
  2. In Dreamweaver, define a new site.
  3. Set the "Local root folder" for the Dreamweaver site to the web-content folder of the GoLive site as shown below.



That's it. You can now open the site in GoLive and create a MenuMachine menu. Both Dreamweaver and GoLive will be able to access all of the assets in your site.

The only thing you need to do when switching between GoLive and Dreamweaver is to make sure you refresh the site window in one application if you have added, renamed or moved any files in the other application. This includes creating the MenuMachine folder.

Special consideration is required if you use MenuMachine on a template and then apply the template to other pages in Dreamweaver. Since MenuMachine is not installed in Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver will not correctly maintain any relative links in the menu. This means that pages in directories that are at a different level to the template will not display the menu correctly. For this reason we recommend setting MenuMachine to use absolute link references before adding the menu to any pages.

To set MenuMachine to use absolute link references:

  1. Open the MenuMachine preferences dialog
  2. Click the Advanced tab
  3. turn on "Make menu support file links absolute". You can normally leave the Link Prefix at the default setting of "/".


This setting will only take effect for new menu instances, so if you have existing menus on any pages you will need to place the menus again for the code to be updated.

Last updated: July 23, 2007

This article has been viewed 19713 times.

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