What Happened to my menus ?

[TulsaMusicTV]

I just opened WS4 and it wanted to download some templates. OK, some were free, the majority must be purchased. The problem is now my menus are not appearing in Dreamweaver anymore. I can see them in the browser but not in the editor.

I guess this is the price I must pay Xara to advertise their products on my computer.

Today I advised all my clients who have purchesed xara to apply for a refund. I will not promote or support the product any longer. I am to stubborn to give in myself, there are still some uses for parts of the product. I will never upgrade, add-on or trail any xara product again until I can be assured it will be supported.

I have been dealing with computer hardware and software for 24 years. I am not new to this, I have redone projects with xara now I can see the underlying cause for it's limitations. Xara wants to squeeze every penny it can out of the market. It will never be an effecient ( usefull ) until Xara starts sharing information.


I did manage to get 2 websites up using the Xara templates. http://www.tulsamusic.tv and http://srcamp.com. Too bad the will have to be re-done.

[TulsaMusicTV]

excuse my typos, I was upset, I'm better now...
http://www.talkgraphics.com/images/smilies/cool.gif

[TulsaMusicTV]

I have unistalled and re-installed WS4 and Dreamweaver. I can now see the navBars in both the editor and browser.

[TulsaMusicTV]

OK after re-installing everything I had my menus back, .....until.....
I saved the file under a different name. Original file name = work_template.html, saved as....index.html

I have a Top NavBar and a left NavBar. If I open the page with dreamweaver and remove the code for the top NavBar, the Left NavBar magicly re-appears. I can put the code for the top NavBar some place else on the page and both NavBars are visable. When the page is saved and closed then re-opened, the NavBars are no longer visible



I am no longer trying to create a page using any Xara Template, Rather, I have reverted to Menu Maker 1.1 for Menus only.
I started with a blank page and set the back ground color to black, created 2 tables to contain the menus, (is this the problem? a menu inside a table ?) I then inserted the menus into the appropriate table cell. Like I said every thing looked perfect until I saved the file under a different file name. I had opened, edited and saved the original file many times and the menus were always visible. now the menus are as described above.

Is this a problem with Dreamweaver ? I have an entire site up on the web that was done with WS4 and Front Page 2002, I did not see this behaviour in Front Page.


The reason for using MenuMaker rather than WS4 to create the menus was becase the design I wanted is not in WS4. The problem originaly started is WS4.

Sorry the pages in question are not on the net right now, I will endevor to get them there soon.


Thank for all your help. (I do have faith that someone will help)

[TulsaMusicTV]

Update:

Attention Dreamweaver MX 2004 users, if your menus disappear in the editor but show up in the browser, edit anything in the code (put a space at the end of any line) then the dreamweaver refresh button appears, click it and your menus will return.

I have sent this to Xara support but do not expect an answer, they have never answered my first 2 questions. This is without a doubt the sorriest software company I have ever had to deal with. (25 years of computing here, I am not a newbie, this software is full of bugs)

[TulsaMusicTV]

There is support at Xara !!!!
2 of the 3 problems are handled.


Thank you,

The problem seems to be gone now. the only thing I did was (after I was satisfied I could use the same 2 menus accross the entire site, In Dreameweaver I copied and renamed my work_template.html file to blank.html I created enough copies of blank .html to corespond to the URLs entered into MenuMaker1.1. (74 html pages), one page for each menu link. At some point during that process I noticed that as I was opening up the blank pages to enter some identifing text, the menus were no longer invisable. Probably soemthing I did wrong, but putting 2 menus on a blank page was pretty straight forward.

In addition, I went back and re-opened work_template.html (the original problem page), it too was working correctly.
As I said the problem seems to be gone. I am curious to see what happens when I start the next project.

The pages I am reffering to for this ticket number are at www.harmantelecom.com all the menus and links are working fine.

Thanks again.

[TulsaMusicTV]

PS, it's just a shell, my client will start entering text this morning.