Those of you who follow the Fireworks forum postings will probably recognize my name. I suppose I may have gotten a reputation as a crusader who opposes the use of the original Fireworks Pop-Up Menu as implemented in Macromedia Fireworks MX 2004 and earlier. I'm here to tell you that you are absolutely right. There are more than a few reasons not to use those pop-up menus, in my opinion, and I have spent a fair amount of time posting to this effect.

So why am I writing this article, then? Well, I have an agenda, as follows:

• I want to tell the Fireworks team that I appreciate the effort that they have devoted to making this new menu system.
• I want to tell you that I will no longer bore you with my usual posts about not using this menu system.
• I am very hopeful that the Dreamweaver development team will take these comments to heart and focus on the pop-up menu feature in future releases of that program.

In this article I briefly describe the creation of a menu in various modes. I examine and discuss the markup created by Fireworks ready for import into Dreamweaver, and describe what I think might be useful improvements to consider in the resulting markup.

Building a Pop-Up Menu
Those of you who have used the pop-up menu feature in earlier versions of Fireworks will be right at home in the current one. The setup and dialog panel are identical in Fireworks MX 2004 and Fireworks 8, offering exactly the same options and choices. Using this feature in Fireworks 8, you can build visually pleasing menu sets. It's easy to see its appeal.

To examine the pop-up menus that Fireworks 8 creates, you will need to create several extremely simple files. For the first one, open Fireworks and select File > New to create a new page - say, 640 x 400 pixels. Select the text tool and enter Link1 anywhere on the page.

Exit the text tool and then draw a slice around Link1 (I made mine 41 pixels wide and 23 pixels tall). Select it, name it link1button, use the selected slice's bull's-eye to drop the context menu, and select Add Pop-up Menu from the menu choices. A panel will open, and you will make this slice show a simple, single-option submenu. In this panel enter Sub1-1 under the Text column head. There is no need to enter a link or a target.

Now click the Next button to advance to the Appearance tab (or just click the tab), where you can select that this is a vertical menu. With no further adjustment, the submenu will be drawn on top of the top menu choice, so you should advance to the Position tab and click the second position icon from the left. Leave the rest of the settings in this and the other tabs at their default values, and conclude this menu by clicking Done. Save this file as singlebutton.png.

Preview the menu by selecting File > Preview in Browser and then choosing your browser of choice. You should see a single-button menu which, upon rollover, drops a single-option submenu. With singlebutton.png still open, you can now add more buttons to the menu. For the purposes of this tutorial, you will add three more menu buttons and give each of them a single pop-up submenu. To do this, deselect the visible slices option in the Web Layer tools, double-click Link1, and append Link2 Link3 Link4 to it (I have put two spaces between each link name).

Now exit text mode, enable the visible slices option, and select the slice tool to add a slice of similar dimension to link1button to each of the three new menu options. Beginning with Link2, name each new slice using a nomenclature similar to that used previously: link2button, link3button, and link4button. One by one, select each new slice and use the bull's-eye to add a pop-up menu with a single submenu: Sub2-1, Sub3-1, and Sub4-1. Save this new menu arrangement as fourbutton.png.

A preview in browser should once again reveal what good work you do.

Importing the Pop-Up Menu into Dreamweaver
Now that you have two menus created - one with a single button and a single pop-up menu, and one with four buttons, each with a single pop-up menu - it's time to get these into Dreamweaver and examine the markup.

Open singlebutton.png and select File > Export. Choose a landing site for the files from this (I created a folder called single and placed these files into that folder). Looking closely at the Export panel, make sure that the Export field is set to HTML and Images, the HTML field is set to Export HTML File, and the Slices field is set to Export Slices, with the Include Areas Without Slices check box also enabled.

Click the Options button and choose your favorite HTML style and extension. Of the four check boxes on that HTML Setup panel, you need to have at least the bottom two selected (Use CSS for Popup Menus and Write CSS to an External File). Click OK to get out of this HTML Setup panel and the previous Export panel to save the files.

Do the same for fourbutton.png (I created a folder called fourbutton and placed these files there). You have now created all the files you need for the remainder of this tutorial. For me, this process gets the following relevant files in the single folder (and analogous ones in the fourbutton folder): singlebutton.html, singlebutton.css, and mm_css_menu.js. The singlebutton files will be used to describe the details of the menu and its construction. The fourbutton files are there to examine the CSS needed for this slightly more "real-world" example.

The process of inserting these menus into Dreamweaver is exactly the same as it has been for several releases now. Open your Dreamweaver page, place the insertion point where you want the menu inserted, and select Insert > Image Objects > Fireworks HTML. For the remainder of this tutorial, you will examine the code written by Fireworks to understand how these menus are built and how they work. I will use the original files written by Fireworks 8 for this explanation.

Looking at the Code
A glance at the HTML immediately reveals that these menus are very different from those built in earlier versions of Fireworks. The most significant difference is that the links are not written into plain HTML markup on the page.