TechNote (Archived)

Limitations of Fireworks generated pop-up menus in Dreamweaver

When working with pop-up menus in Dreamweaver that Fireworks generated, there are a number of things to keep in mind as they may cause a problem.

Using pop-up menus in Dreamweaver Templates
Pop-up menus are not working in my web browser
Roundtriping files that have been edited in Dreamweaver will lose any changes made in Dreamweaver
CSS Popup menus do not display correctly in Internet Explorer 5
Color edits made to CSS popup menu's in Dreamweaver can be lost when round tripped with Fireworks 8

Using pop-up menus in Dreaweaver Templates

When using Fireworks generated pop-up menus in a Dreamweaver Templates, links will not work and images are missing in the Dreamweaver preview and in a browser. This is due to Fireworks generated pop-up menus being based on JavaScript and the paths to images and links being defined relative to the hosting HTML file

Here are a few suggestions that can provide a workaround for this issue.

Have all files that use the template in the same directory
Search the Dreamweaver Exchange for third-party options for creating pop-up menus differently
Once the code for the HTML file has been incorporated into the template the code for the links could be manually edited to be site root relative. This would limit the ability to do round trip the file back to Fireworks.

Using site root-relative paths with Fireworks Pop-up Menus in Dreamweaver templates (TechNote tn_15832)

Pop-up menus are not working in my web browser

The Fireworks generated pop-up menus are based on JavaScript. Some older web browsers may not support JavaScript and or have that support disabled. If you find that a browser that you are using is not displaying the pop-up menus try the following to work around this.

Check the preferences in the web browser and confirm there are no options to allow JavaScript.
Search the Dreamweaver or Fireworks Exchanges for an option to generate pop-up menus that are not based on JavaScript.

Changes lost after a round trip edit in Fireworks

Round trip editing Fireworks files that have been edited in Dreamweaver will lose any changes that have been made directly in Dreamweaver.

This is due to the round trip process going back to the original PNG file in Fireworks which would override any changes made in the generated HTML that has been imported into Dreamweaver.

In the event that you need to make the simplest of changes to the pop-up menus it is best to always round trip the files back to Fireworks.

CSS Popup menus do not display correctly in Internet Explorer 5

Fireworks 8 CSS Popup menus may have display or usability issues when using the Internet Explorer 5 browsers.

If you intend on using CSS popup menus generated from Fireworks 8, it is recommended to require users to view these with a newer version of Internet Explorer or another browser that supports CSS pop-up menus.

Color edits made to CSS popup menu's in Dreamweaver can be lost when round tripped with Fireworks 8

If you create CSS pop-up menus in Fireworks 8 and insert them into your Dreamweaver HTML, any future edits made to the pop-up menus should be performed in Fireworks via round trip editing. If the pop-up menus are modified within Dreamweaver, any additional round trip edits with Fireworks may result in the loss of some pop-up menu properties that had previously been modified in Dreamweaver.