I've made multiple menu's with xara and other menu-builders and integrated them in sitespinner.
It's not that difficult, but one should know what to do. Once you've done it, it is simple programming.

1. First make your menu's in Xara look at a submenu (e.g. submenu 'menu')
- a link in xara should be '../[<sub path>/]<page.html|page.php>'

=> the '..' means that the os starts one directory up (in the example the website root or for testing the preview directory)

2. Save your xara menu, in xara you can also set a sub-directory for images. This should be the 'menu' submenu (so all menu images are placed there).

3. Xara should create a <name>.html file as a sample to view the menu. Here you find the coding you need for the menu to show on the html page.

4. create a code placeholder in your sitespinner project page (any html page). Be sure to set the z-order to front (top only), otherwise the menu is displayed behind some other page objects that are defined on top of the page.

5. Insert the xara coding: It should be something simular to this:

/********/

<script src="menu/xaramenu.js"></script>
<script Webstyle4 src="menu/mainmenu.js">/script>

/***********/

That's all it takes.
The xara menu (in the java script) also responds to pages that are defined as a link in the top level of the menu, this means that the corresponding button is highlighted when you select the corresponding webpage in your webbrowser. No extra code is needed for that (it extracts the name from the menu and page name definitions and compares them, eg a link to index.html in menu is compared with the filename index.html. If a button is defined for this page, it is highlighted automatically.

6. The last thing you should do is to copy the menu directory made by xara to the preview directory for preview actions by sitespinner. Remember, the menu is considered to be an external object, so you should keep maintenance of it.

7. When publishing your site, also publish the menu subdirectory to the root directory of your website e.g. /web/menu on the webserver.

8. If you are not so familiair with publishing pages, I can advise you to set up a webserver for testeing purposes on your own pc. I use the free apache webserver for instance (as it is mostly used on the internet on e.g. linux webhosts), but you can also use the additional iss webserver that comes with MS windows 2000/XP

Have fun,

Mark

Hi Mark,

Great tutorial on Xara - would be great under the User's Tips section.