Konductor Blog

Managing a site’s menus can be a challenge, especially for people who don’t understand HTML. So how can you let your clients manage them without looking at any code or needing to worry about each page that menu appears on?

Using Konductor’s menu management tool, you can design their site so they only need to update a menu in one place, without any code, and it’ll then automatically apply across all the pages that use it.

Here’s how to set up your template(s):

1. In the DWT (Dreamweaver template) that needs a menu, create a dummy menu using an unordered list. The list items themselves don’t need to be the final product as they’re just a placeholder, but give them the CSS attributes that they’ll need. Your code will look something like this:

<ul id="topnav" class="big">
	<li><a href="/cat.html">Cat</a></li>
	<li><a href="/dog.html">Dog</a></li>
	<li><a href="/bird.html">Bird</a></li>
</ul>

2. Select this code inside Dreamweaver, with the ends of the selection being the unordered list tags.
3. Make this menu an editable region (Insert > Template Objects > Editable Region).
4. In Design View, click this new editable region’s top tab. This will cause Konductor’s properties inspector to show.
5. Select “Menu Region…” in Konductor’s properties inspector.
6. Save and upload the newly edited DWT.

This video recaps the above:

Now that the template is ready, you’ll be able to build and manage this menu in the Konductor app:

Here are some example files that you can practice on to create editable menus. The template “editable-menus.dwt” in /Templates is already completed for you, so try to mimic it using “to-make-editable.html”: Editable Menus Example Files

Websites have content and if you have more than one page on a site then you’ll probably need some navigation as well. With Konductor you can allow your clients to manage not only that content but also the menus and links which lead to them.

By defining an editable region as being a menu in Dreamweaver you’re essentially defining a placeholder for where you and your clients can later start building and inserting menus dynamically from within the Konductor application. These menus will also be styled exactly how you want since we only use the CSS that you include. Since pages are built in the application, why not menus as well?

For more specifics on how to define and then build menus with Konductor see the following videos: