patrickWeb

Sunday, January 30, 2005

Pop Menu Magic

Toolbox The team at Macromedia has done a fantastic job in creating Dreamweaver MX 2004. Dreamweaver contains just about everything one needs to build, publish, and maintain a website. It is hard for me to imagine building a website without strong WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) capability. The one thing that Dreamweaver does not have is an easy way to create and maintain a menu for your site. I have had a menu on my homepage for as long as I can remember but it has always been a challenge. Then I discovered Project Seven Development, a small software company in Dobson, North Carolina. They have a product called Tree Menu Magic. Tree Menu Magic is a Dreamweaver extension kit that enables you to make tree-style menus. The process is totally automated from inside Dreamweaver via a user interface that mirrors the actual menu you are building (or modifying). Tree Menu Magic is what is currently part of patrickWeb.

The product and the support have been of excellent quality but it was time for an update my menu so I stopped by PVII to see what was new. Glad I did -- because I found Pop Menu Magic. It is quite clear that the PVII team had a strong vision about what the perfect "popup" menu was and then they made a tool that builds it. Pop Menu Magic is powerful and feature-rich - a fully automated Dreamweaver Extension that allows you to insert a professionally styled popup menu on your page "in seconds" -- well I would say minutes, but definitely a very productive tool. Popup menus are much more natural and dynamic than the "tree" style currently on patrickWeb. The menu can be vertical like mine or horizontal and there are no limits to the number of sub-levels you can have. My test page with the new menu is right here on this page. This blog posting will not change, but the test page I am testing and refining will. The background color and appearance will surely change but please fee free to give me any feedback about it. I plan to complete testing and populate the new menu across all the hundreds of pages of patrickWeb when I get back from a trip a week from now.