Ran into problems implementing my new site using Xara Web Designer 9 premium

[leokrabbendam]

Hello everyone!
I would like to pick your brains, or hear your opinions, on a difficulty I am experiencing building a website with Xara Web Designer 9 Premium. If you want to read a small introducion first, just continue reading. Otherwise jump to “What is the problem”

Introduction
As a newbie Xara Web Designer 9 Premium user, but otherwise with some considerable IT expertise and experience (albeit just a little where it concerns webdesign and development) I am currently updating and modernizing an old site of us (me and my better half). For this I selected, after a lot of Googling and pondering, Xara Web Designer 9 Premium. Main considerations, among many, were the favourable impression I got from the material on the Xara site, some positive reviews, the fact that Xara has a long trackrecord implying that it at least somewhat knows what its doing, and of course the quite reasonable price.
And, happy to say, two to three weeks into my project, I am not disappointed.

Still, all is not well. Let me describe the site I'm making first. It will be about our company, which is offering dogsled tours to tourists, with our pack of huskies, in the middle of Sweden. The site will give information about what we offer, hopefully promoting it too. Lots of visual material of course and factual information.
The site will be in three languages (possibly four) and each language version will have about twelve to fifteen pages. Some short ones, some a bit longer. We already have a site, but that definitely needs modernizing.

Looking for inspiration I was attracted to the Landcapes theme that is included with the Xara product. Not the visual aspects of the template, but the way in which the Products page of that template is constructed.

It looks like this: Like all pages in the template it has a header with a horizonal navigation bar to move through the site just below it. Below that is, on the left side, a vertical navigation bar with a button for each product and on the right side, a short introduction to the products in general. Pressing a button on the vertical navbar results in, on the right side, detailed info on the selected products, overlaying the previous info there.
I think it looks wonderful and it covers our needs, presenting info on the different types of tours we offer very nicely.

What is the problem?

The template page works by having pop-up layers (one per product) appear on the righthand side of the lower part of the page, triggered by pressing on of the buttons of the navbar left.

I got into trouble trying to implement this however. After experiencing two problems, which are not really relevant to what I want to tell here but where I was helped out in an impressively clear and fast way by Acorn on this forum (thanks again Acorn!), I ran into what I feel to be a limitiation of what I can do with layers in Xara Web Designer.

As implemented in the template, every pop-up layer closes automatically. In practice this means that focus returnes to the main page (i.e. The MouseOff layer) as soon as you do anything with the mouse, resulting in the info disappearing again. A bit too strongly put perhaps, but for instance using a vertical scrollbar is often enough to do the trick. Even just clicking -on the popup layer itself- is enough to make it disappear. Definitely not workeable for our purposes, alas.

On the other hand, setting to popup layers to NOT automatically close has two different negative effects.

First, admittedly just a minor thing which I could live with, this creates a small button in the righthand top of the popup layer to enable manual closing. Well, not too bad.

Secondly however, if a user ignores this close button and just selects a new item to view (a new popup layer) to overlay the previous one, things go south fast. In Web Designer these popup layers have a fixed order. This means that when you have select a layer highup, and then select one below that, the latter one will not become visible, being obscured by the higher one.
Using the close button, of course, will prevent this.
But this is, in my humble opinion, not a natural thing to do. If there is a menu one just should be able to select items without bothering to close other things first. I am certain that the general user will get confused and that wont be favourable to their impression of our site.

Now, knowing a bit about HTML and CSS, I realize that what I want is technically not hard. Lets say you have 10 different popup layers, just assign z-values of (lets say) 12,14..., 28, 30 to them. When a popup-layer is requested, change the z value to 255 and up it comes. When another is requested, restore the z to its previous value and set the z of the new layer to 255. And so on.

Now there is no way, unless I am very stupid, to do this in Web Designer. And one of the reasons that I decided to use this product was exactly to avoid digging around in HTML, Javascript and the like.... I want to keep it sort of high level!

I see only two alternatives:

First.... forget the popup layers and using plain old pages for each product. Being careful with the layout we can achieve almost the same visual effect. But not completely.... And these popup layers looked so nice.... damn!

Second : I can use iframes. Defining a region of my page to show another page in.... that last page would correspond to the layer. Should work.
However, I seem to remember that people frowned upon the use of iframes. And, even worse, I cant seem to figure out how I can get that running in Web Designer. Tried defining a rectangled shape, naming it, and linking something to that name. But that doesnt work

At last... what do I want to know from all you out there?

One: Am I being stupid and is, what I want, doable in Web Designer 9? If so, how?
Two: Am I overlooking something, or other alternative solutions?
Three: How do I get iframes to work in Web Designer 9?

Thank you for taking the time to read all this, and even more thanks if you take the trouble to reply!

Cheers, Leo

[zaphodeist]

This should help

Locking pop-ups. Similar to the locking pop-ups tweak in the WD5 tweakset. The pop-up layer which name contains "(lock)" is a locking layer. If opened with the on-click layer pop-up it will lock visible until explicitly closed. However, if initiated by on mouse over pop-up it's not locked. To close the locked pop-up layer you need a button (any object with a link) placed on this layer. The URL link of this button should be: "popup:close".
That's the simplified use. For hardcore users there is an advanced syntax.
Any URL that begins with "popup:" is treated as a special command that can open and close multiple pop-up layers simultaneously. You have to list layer names in quotes. All layers following the "popup:" are opened. All layers following the "close" word are closed. All layers following the "open" word are opened. If there is a "close" word that is not followed by any layer name, it closes the layer on which this button is placed (see the simplified use).

Note: all layers listed in such links are automatically recognized as pop-ups. You don't have to link them the usual way to make them pop-ups as was necessary with the WD5 tweak.

Note: the pop-up layer names must only contain lower case letters to work correctly with this feature. This may be changed in the following updates.

Example: popup: "popup1", "popup2" close "popup3"

Use in Web Properties>>Link

From here - http://board.xara-users.info/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=218 Referencing an older version but still works

[leokrabbendam]

Zaphodeist,

"This should help", you say??

Well.... it certainly does! Works like a charm! I am truly in your debt. You have saved me from a lot of extra work.
Thank you very much!

I've got one question left though....

Where or how do I find more information like this? I mean, I followed the link you supplied and looked at that, but I suspect there must be more goodies like this.

Thanks again,

a happy

Leo

[zaphodeist]

Glad to help Leo There are loads of gems here on TG and at XU - Xara is so versatile - but it's a matter of searching, and asking questions, there is no single archive.

[beanie3556]

This should help



Use in Web Properties>>Link

From here - http://board.xara-users.info/viewtopic.php?f=26&t=218 Referencing an older version but still works

Hi Zaphodeist,
I wanted to read more about the solution that you suggested in the thread. However, the thread just forwarded me to a facebook group for Xara-users. I was not able to find the related post. It it is not too much trouble to you, could I humbly ask you to repost a link so that I can read about the suggested solution. Leokrabbendams problem is similar to a problem that I have on my site. Therefore, I hope that I maybe could get a solution to my problem is I was able to read your suggested advice.

Thank you very much in advance for your support.

Best Regards,
Bjorn

[zaphodeist]

https://www.talkgraphics.com/showthr...anced-features

The pop-up layers info is number 10 :-)

Those posts were more than 3 years ago and the Xara Users forum is no more sadly. Any info that has been transferred to FB so far is under the Files tab in the XaraUsers group [which is a closed group so you'd have to join to see them] ;-)

[gwpriester]

Hi Leo

I wanted to respond to your post but I fell asleep three times. Must be the long nights in Sweden now, eh?