drop down menus

[razzle0146]

Sheila,

There are multiple videos about popups on this site. I myself have posted some so I know they are here.. It really boils down to the way John put it. All the menus really are, are popup layers. Thats it. I will try to make this as painless as possible and if you still don't get it, we can work out a time and I use a program called teamvier, it will let me control your pc or show you my pc screen and I will show you step by step how to create a popup layer and create the roll over effect. For now I will put in lehmans terms the steps it takes....

Step 1) New project - The layers are currently MouseOff and MouseOver..

Step2) Create a new layer called popup1 and MouseOver popup1
(You now have MouseOff, MouseOver, popup1 & MouseOver popup1correct?)

Step3) Make sure you are on the MouseOff layer, then draw a rectangle on the canvas.

Step4) Now select the popup1 layer and draw a rectangle on it. Check and uncheck the checkbox to make sure it disappears and reappers with every check.

Step5) Select the MouseOff layer and click on the rectangle that was placed onto the MouseOff layer. Right click it and select web properties, now click the Mouse-over tab, now go down to the last drop down box, drop it down and select popup1.

Step6) Preview your page. When the page first loads you should see the MouseOff layer rectangle. If you hover your mouse over the rectangle you should see the popup1 layer rectangle. Do you? If you do, then you see how easily it is to create a popup menu or anything else that pops up that you want.

If you can get this far then you have this figured out and no longer need any help...lol... Well maybe a little help... Just remember, anything that you want on a specific layer will have to be placed onto that layer. I have caught myself so many times putting some content on a layer, thinking it was the correct layer, but ending up it was the wrong layer and I had to move it. Just remember to place all content on the correct layers and then right clicking on the object that is going to call the popup and right clicking it, selecting web properties, Mouse-over tab and selecting the correct popup layer from the drop down list. Remember... I use the name popup for demo purposes.... You can use whatever name you see fit.. Just remember to call the corerct name... I will post a short video on this procedure so you can see how it is supposed to work and hopefully you get the same results.... I didn't put MouseOver or Down... Just wanted to show you how to start the popup process...

Hope this helps you...

[himagain]

Hi himagain.

Can you provide either a written description, or a prepared graphic, that
clearly outlines how you would like your navigation controls to work. Perhaps we folks can help you work through an example that is directly applicable to your current project.

Hi Curtis,
Thank you, but basically I expected to use XWD similarly to FrontPage or some of the similar "just-click" programs out there, only easier!
It now still seems much easier to just plugin a DHTML menu system to me so far.
The Project:
It is the launch of a series of interconnected websites some of which I do expect to be a little more difficult, requiring PHP for dynamic content, but overall I need to send the collected data from webforms and sales on each Site/Domain to a database.

There is nothing to see yet. I was expecting XWD to have made a lot of the design/construction by now

But I did/do need what XWD basically offers - quick easily-assembled websites of less than 10 pages initially.

HOWEVER - guests must be able to enrol in multiple activities from a simple member list to an online Course and make purchases and be returned to a secure download or access page.

I just went and looked at the parent Xara Site and saw it was actually sales-form-detailed in TYPO3 - a great but complex CMS!

I'm prepared to have to look at additional plug-in programs (e.g. I was disappointed at the scant graphics and templates that came with XWD (I did see the figure of 700 somewhere originally) but am concerned at how to "hook" other programs in to XWD for continuity.
vis: A visitor arrives looks around and elects to apply for a Newsletter, then decides to enrol in a Course. Can be a free one, or by applying for paid membership, can access the whole Site.
XWD can't handle any of that??

I'm looking at Coffeecup and PayPal at the moment as contenders. My key always is K.I.S.S. -and wondering would there be any hitches in melding them in to XWD.

Cheers?
HimAGAIN

[Soquili]

Hello HimAgain,

You are aware that Web Designer is a completely new application? There was never a version 4 , or 3, or 2 or even 0.

Web Designer is also totally new in concept as no other application has ever been a true What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) application. Many have claimed to be so, but in fact never were. I tried FrontPage, I think it was version 98 or possibly 2000 and using it to edit a functioning website created using Notepad. FrontPage totally trashed the layout of every element on the page. Needless to say the program was not one of my favorites. Sorry for digressing to my personal past history.

I ask if you are aware of Web Designer's history because your questions and comments seem to indicate you think it has been around much longer then the 2 months of it's existance.

Anyone familiar with Xara X and it's successors (X¹, Xtreme and Xtreme Pro) are accustomed to creating unique interfaces from simple geometric shapes. I believe some people use Photoshop to create an interface design but differ to FrontPage (depricated since 2003, replaced with Expression Web) or Dreamweaver (or any of many other applications) to build the site.

Web Designer is both the design (drawing tool) and the builder of the site.

John (Covoxer) has mentioned many times that suggestions to include a navbar builder and/or some other auto-generated web doodad are being considered and may even be in development as we speak.

Everyone (including experienced Xara Xtreme users) are newbies to Web Designer.

I'm simply hoping people will see that Web Designer is *New* in every sense of the word. New to web design, new to everyone on the planet, and a radically new way of creating web sites.

[Sheila]

Hi Razzle:

Sorry it took a while to get back to you, I had to work on another project.

I can't thank you enough for the video you made, what a difference watching everything. In your directions in Step5) I would have missed the # sign in Link to web address but you had showed it on the video. I was able to accomplish what you did. I tried to go further into making links and naming them, but I got lost in Step5 because I had only one black rectangle and I couldn't rename it because it was already named popup1. What is the next process? How do I get the names of my links on the rectangle I draw? How do I place these links under the Link Button? I used a different color for popup2 so I could sample my work.

I need additional steps on a video like you did the last one. Great job and it's so nice of you to spend extra time helping us out.
Sheila

[holon35]

Hi,

Well it's easy to do this with squares, but if you drag'n drop button from gallery, it's allways add to MouseOff Layer or over, but with popup1 layer selected and the two little check boxes selected it's impossible to directly add a button from gallery !
Cut and Paste in Place change nothing...

For make it working I had some more work :
1) Drag'drop button
2) Arrange + Ungroup
3) Edit + cut objects
4) Be sure to select and check popup1, Edit + Paste in place
5) Arrange + Group

An now, when you uncheck first square of popup1 you can see you button invisible.

For me it's impossible to add directly a button from gallery to layer...
Is there a more simple way to do that ?

[razzle0146]

Sheila,

I will put together another video tomorrow and post it. It will contain a three button navbar with a couple drop downs and hopefully that will get you where you want to be with xwd..

Thanks..

[razzle0146]

Sheila,

Here is the video I prmised.. It is not anything special to look at, but I didn't want to create a huge file, so I made it really quick..

Yes this is made with rectangles, but it can be made just as easily with buttons.. An above post stated that it was easy with squares and it is, just remember that it is just as easy with buttons from the designs gallery after you get the hang of it.. This is just for a quick example to show you how easy it is to make these navbars... I made this in 5 minutes.. Just think what you could do with an hour or so...

Hope this helps you out some...

[holon35]

Sheila,

Here is the video I prmised.. It is not anything special to look at, but I didn't want to create a huge file, so I made it really quick..

Yes this is made with rectangles, but it can be made just as easily with buttons.. An above post stated that it was easy with squares and it is, just remember that it is just as easy with buttons from the designs gallery after you get the hang of it.. This is just for a quick example to show you how easy it is to make these navbars... I made this in 5 minutes.. Just think what you could do with an hour or so...

Hope this helps you out some...

No !!!
As I've already said : it is not the same result with button directly add from gallery and simple drag'ndrop....
Is it my poor english that make so hard to explain it...

With button from gallery... It is not the same.....
See my post above, have you really read it ?
You cant directly add the button to the rigth layer....

Your video was not most bigger if you use button than squares ! And I'm very very happy to see it with button.

I've paid for WebDesigner, and for the moment I'm not very enthousiast...

[slavelle]

Holon,

Seems like you are being a bit impatient since razzle and most of the others here, including myself are just users of the software. Volunteers. This is a peer to peer forum that has some strong moderators and a developer who regularly participate, but it's not really a support forum.

I agree that it's a little wierd that you can't drag the buttons to other layers, but at the same time, I understand what happens here: The default buttons have mouseover states and are soft-grouped and all that to work the way they do. I'm not sure they anticipated people using popup layers that then used buttons from the gallery on them, including their mouseover states which they probably should have, but didn't, and I'd expect that there will be at least some changes to how this stuff works in coming versions because of the commonality of the requests.

I think what razzle was getting at is that it would take longer to create the video using prebuilt buttons or drawing fancy buttons from scratch or whatever and THAT would make the video longer/bigger - not by the mere presense of the fancier graphics within.

It's not very difficult to create a button from scratch and create a mouseover for it and then apply those buttons to your popup layers. It's a bit of a nuisance (sp?) to copy soft groups from one layer combo to another, but it's totally doable and I just created a menu with dropdowns and then drop outs from that, using buttons from the gallery and little patience - took about 10 minutes for five buttons, 4 drop down buttons from one of the above, and one flyout menu from the dropdown.

Take a step back and imagine how long this "simple" task takes in CSS or HTML or including java libraries to work right and then think of those other applications that make creating drop downs easy: they typically also limit your design pretty drastically. I've created some dropdown and popup stuff in XWD that would be either impossible or prohibitively difficult to accomplish with straight up coding without a LOT of frustration and browser compatibility problems.

Just my $.02

[cursor]

At the risk of getting my head bitten off ...


As holon35 indicates above, if you drag & drop a button from the gallery (which sports both static and mouseover graphics & behavior), then its two states are always positioned on the MouseOff and MouseOver layers. This happens regardless of any current user-defined layer setup (visibility & selectabilty option boxes, and current layer setting).

Consider following this proceedure when wanting to drag a button from the gallery to a popup layer (with its companion mouseover-popup layer):

• Layer Gallery
  [x] [x] mouseOver-PopUp
  [x] [x] PopUp
  [x] [x] MouseOver
  [x] [x] MouseOff
• Drag a gallery button to the target web page. Selecting the new button results in the following status line, "2 groups (Soft Group) on 2 layers".
• Arrange > Remove soft group. The status line reads, "2 groups on 2 layers".
• Hit the Esc key to deselect the button.
• In the Layer Gallery Turn off visibility & selectability for the MouseOver layer.
• Select the visible button. The status line reads, "1 group on layer MouseOff".
• In the Layer Gallery, make the PopUp layer the current layer, then click the Move button at the top. The status line now reads, "1 group on layer PopUp".
• Hit the Esc key to deselect the button.
• In the Layer Gallery:
  Turn off visibility & selectability for the MouseOff layer.
  Turn off visibility & selectability for the PopUp layer.
  Turn on visibility & selectability for the MouseOver layer.
• Select the visible button. The status line reads, "1 group on layer MouseOver".
• In the Layer Gallery, make the mouseOver-PopUp layer the current layer, then click the Move button at the top. The status line now reads, "1 group on layer mouseOver-PopUp".
• Hit the Esc key to deselect the button.
• In the Layer Gallery:
  Turn on visibility & selectability for the mouseOver-PopUp layer.
  Turn on visibility & selectability for the PopUp layer.
• Lasso-select the button. The status line reads, "2 groups on 2 layers".
• Do an Arrange > Apply Soft Group. The status line reads, "2 groups (Soft Group) on 2 layers".

Your button is now set up to function as a popup unit on a popup layer ... with mouseover effect.

Still to be done, however:

• Stimulate the new popup button from some other object (Web Properties > Mouseover [tab] > Show popup layer)
• Set the button's Link value (Web Properties > Link > Link to ...)

While this sequence might seem lengthy (the sequence is very precisely detailed), it can be done in about a minute (once you get the hang of it, and understand what is actually being accomplished). Of course, once one button has been successfully layer-moved, it can simply be cloned (Ctrl+K) and moved, or simply right-mouse clicked and dragged.

Clear?