How do I use MenuMachine with Frames?

MenuMachine works within frames and you can link menu items to pages which will load in a chosen frame.

Naming frames correctly

It is very important to use the correct naming conventions when naming frames otherwise they will not work.

1. A frame name must not contain hyphens (-), periods (.) or spaces.
2. Underscores (_) are allowed.
3. A frame name must start with a letter, not a number.
4. Frame names are case-sensitive.
5. You can't use words that are reserved in JavaScript (e.g. content, top or body) as frame names.
6. Frame names should be unique single words e.g. mynav or sidemenu.

Crossing frame borders

Menus can't cross frame borders. The entire menu should be inside the single frame. You may need to use the Menu Overlap settings to achieve this.

Removing the frame border

By default the frame border is 6px wide. To turn off the frame borders, go to the Frameset tab in the Inspector. Set the Border Size to 0px and set the Frame Border to No.

Safari bugs

Safari has some bugs with frames unless "auto" scrolling is turned on in the Inspector. Keep the content of the frame small enough not to need scroll bars and set the Scrolling to "auto". The scroll bars won't turn on unless there is something larger than the frame in the page so try to just have only the menu on the page which is loaded into that frame.

Testing the menu fits in the frame

To make sure your menu fits inside the frame, turn on frame preview in the Inspector.

Test your menu in the preview to make sure it fits in the frame size you have allowed. If not, adjust the frame size so all submenus can open, or increase the Menu Overlap settings in the menu.

Targeting frames

Below you can see a frameset page set up using the correct naming conventions for names of frames: navbarframe and mainpages are the names of our two frames.

The first page to load in the navbarframe is a page containing a menu - leftmenu.html. In the mainpages frame we are loading the home.html page.

When we use the menu in the navbarframe we want to make the linked pages load into the mainpages frame.

It is easiest to work with frames if the frameset page is open at the time. GoLive then includes the names of the frames in drop-down lists for the Target field. If you do not have the frameset page open, you will need to type EXACTLY the right name for targets – otherwise they will not work.

Select the menu item and put in the URL of the page as normal. Next to the Target field is a pull-down menu which lists the four usual targets plus our two new target frames.

In the image below, you can see that the leftmenu.html page and the frameset page frame.html are open. The pull down menu shows the name of our two frames. We need to choose mainpages.

That's it! Continue with the other menu items.

Tips: Preview the frameset page in the browser to see the frames working – not the menu page! Remember to save the menu page before previewing or else you will only see the last saved version. If it's not working, check that you have used correct names for the frames, change them if in doubt. Make sure you have put the correct Traget values in the Target field.

See the example working menu in a frame here.