How to highlight a Spry nav bar?

[Thomas Veil]

Pretty newbie question here: I'm putting together a site, and I've got Spry nav bars. They work really well, but I'm having trouble being able to select them when I want to make changes. In other words, I'll open a page with a nav bar, but I won't see that teal "editable region" tab around the nav bar.

I might see it appear if I close and open the page several times, but sometimes not even then.

And if I can't highlight the whole nav bar, I obviously can't get to the Properties at the bottom to change the text of things like drop-down buttons.

And while I'm on the subject, I'm just curious: is it possible to fully customize those buttons? By which I mean, substitute Photoshop-made buttons? Given the variables that Spry gives you to work with -- button width in pixels, %, etc., I can see how you might not be able to do that.

Thanks!

 

[angelwatt]

What's a Spry nav bar? Is it from a specific product or something?

 

[alfaphlex]

Not 100% positive, but try switching from design view to split view and clicking inside your nav bar's div tag. I believe that should display your nav bar's properties. Should work the same for the submenu elements too.

As far as customizing it, there's a lot you can do with CSS.
http://www.layersmagazine.com/spry-navigation-dreamweaver.html

Don't know if these are the answers you were looking for, I don't use Dreamweaver much anymore.

 

[alfaphlex]

What's a Spry nav bar? Is it from a specific product or something?

I believe Spry is a new set of features in Dreamweaver to facilitate/automate the creation of Ajax code. Don't know how good it is since I never used it; I don't really trust any applications to create code that's supposed to be dynamic.

 

[Thomas Veil]

Not 100% positive, but try switching from design view to split view and clicking inside your nav bar's div tag. I believe that should display your nav bar's properties. Should work the same for the submenu elements too.

As far as customizing it, there's a lot you can do with CSS.
http://www.layersmagazine.com/spry-navigation-dreamweaver.html

Don't know if these are the answers you were looking for, I don't use Dreamweaver much anymore.

Tried the split view and that suggestion worked for me...exactly once. Couldn't do it again.

Although I'm sure I could change the links and text of the buttons in code view, that's more of a pain in the butt.

And yes, angelwatt, it's a new Dreamweaver javascript technology, and it seems a lot easier than anything else I've tried for drop-downs. It also does tabbed panels and other things, though as I said, it's seems from what I can tell to be limited in its ability to be customized.

 

[alfaphlex]

Hey Thomas, I don't know what you're deadline is, but if you want, in a few days I can let you use one of my javascript classes I created for a big project I'm working on. It's specifically for menu-type things.

It's extremely easy to use. You can define the type (drop-down,collapsable tree, tabs, etc) when creating the object. Content, logic, and design are all separated, so you can define the submenus or content area (for tabs) without having to touch any of the code itself and apply whatever design you want through CSS. Very customizable. The best part is that it's all dynamic and can be changed on the fly .

 

[angelwatt]

I believe Spry is a new set of features in Dreamweaver to facilitate/automate the creation of Ajax code. Don't know how good it is since I never used it; I don't really trust any applications to create code that's supposed to be dynamic.

Thanks for the info. I know what you mean about the dynamic code creation. I pretty much do hand coding only anymore just because I only trust me with the code.

I only have an older version of Dreamweaver so can't try things first hand. I went to the Adobe web site and found some documentation (http://livedocs.adobe.com/en_US/Spry/1.4/index.html), but they seem to edit things from the code level rather then the design view. Not sure if that means you can't or not though. Maybe documentation will help you figure it out.

 

[Thomas Veil]

Alfaphlex, I did find that in code view, placing my cursor inside the nav bar code I wanted to change and then deleting a bit and typing something else in "forced" the editable text region to appear. So thanks for that suggestion.

My deadline isn't all that pressing, so I may take you up on your offer. Since I'm still learning, I'm always curious to see what's available.