Namo Web Editor

A dynamic navigation bar is a set of dynamic links that point to nodes in the site treeThe explicitly defined logical structure (hierarchy) of a site, on which dynamic navigation bars are based. of a local siteA managed collection of documents, folders, and resource files on the local file system that you intend to publish as a Web site.. Such links are not fixed to particular documents; their URLs change if you change the site tree, for example by moving a node out and replacing it with another node. Also, a dynamic navigation bar does not have a fixed number of links. The number of links changes if you add or remove nodes in the set of nodes to which the bar links.

When you insert a dynamic navigation bar in a document, you specify a set of nodes to which the bar will contain links. For example, a dynamic navigation bar might link to the child nodes of the current document, or to the document’s parent node and its siblings.

To illustrate, suppose a site has the following navigational structure (site tree):

If the Forum page contains a parent-level dynamic navigation bar, the bar will contain links to Products and Support—the page’s parent and the parent’s siblings. The bar might look like this:

If the Forum page contains a sibling-level dynamic navigation bar, the bar will contain links to Forum, FAQ, and Contacts—but not to WebEditor and HandStory, because those nodes, while on the same level as Forum, do not share the same parent with that node. The bar might look like this:

Now, suppose we add another document as a child node of Support—titled, for example, Knowledge Base:

Then, the sibling-level dynamic navigation bar on the Forum page will automatically change to include the new node:

Dynamic navigation bars can be either horizontally or vertically oriented. You also have a choice of using plain text, Smart ClipArt buttons, or Flash Buttons for the links in dynamic navigation bars.

Dynamic navigation trees are similar to dynamic navigation bars; they too are sets of dynamic links that point to nodes in a site tree. Instead of being of a row or column of links, however, a dynamic navigation tree is a hierarchical menu of links that the user can expand and collapse, like the folder tree in Windows Explorer. The image below shows an example:

Another difference between dynamic navigation bars and dynamic navigation trees is the method of specifying the set of nodes the navigation tree will link to. Rather than specifying a set such as the child nodes of the current document, you specify any set of siblings, or the home page node by itself, to be the top-level link(s) in the navigation tree. All of their child nodes are automatically included in the navigation tree.

Navigation trees are always vertically oriented. You can specify such formatting properties as the font, font size, and colors of the links.

Since dynamic navigation bars and trees contain dynamic links to nodes in a site tree, rather than fixed links to documents, you can only insert a dynamic navigation bar or tree in a document that is part of a local siteA managed collection of documents, folders, and resource files on the local file system that you intend to publish as a Web site., and then only if you have built a site tree for the site.

The labels of the links in dynamic navigation bars and trees, such as “Products” and “Support” in the examples above, come from the navigation names of the corresponding nodes in the site tree. Navigation names are not the same as document titles (what appears in the title bar of a browser when the document is viewed). You assign each node a navigation name in the Site Manager, usually when you add the node. To change a node’s navigation name, do the following:

1. Switch to the Site Manager.
2. Select the node whose name you want to change.
3. Press F2 (or, on the Edit menu, click Rename).
4. Type the new name and press Enter.

When you make changes to the site tree, dynamic navigation bars and trees in any of the site’s documents that are currently open in Namo WebEditor are immediately updated. If a document is not open when you change the site tree, it will be automatically updated the next time you open it. You can also manually force all dynamic navigation bars and trees in all site documents to be updated with a Site Manager command: on the
Tools menu, click Update Navigation Bars.

Namo WebEditor cannot update dynamic navigation bars and trees in documents on a remote siteA collection of documents and resource files, on a Web server, that constitute a Web site.. When documents in the local site are affected by changes in the site tree, you should re-publish the affected documents to the remote site so that the copies there have up-to-date navigation bars and/or trees.