The Left Nav Menus
The left side menu is a high level navigation structure. It's meant to highlight important links relevant to each section of your site. When possible, it's best to link only internal web pages from the left side menu. Avoid linking pdf files or external sites (unless absolutely necessary) from this menu. When properly designed, subsidiary links or documents can often be linked from within the content section of your site in a table or using the "inline" display... basically a place where it can be easily seen and as high up on the page as possible. When linking to a pdf or word doc, it's best to append the name with (.pdf) e.g. benefits (.pdf 30k)
Note: within Contribute, some parts of your site will look as it displays on the page and others may look like lists; that will not affect the ultimate display of your page through a browser. The left side menus are such a file; they will look differently in Contribute than they actually display.
Editing existing menu files
Editing the _menu.html file is a matter of knowing in which directory this file lives and entering it in the address window of Contribute. An example of a such a url might be: http://mirror.www.umb.edu/budget_office/reports/_menu.html. These menus are not viewable in the general page display within Contribute. You would have to enter the url for each menu per directory to edit it.
Note: The Menu file and the files they link to MUST LIVE IN THE SAME DIRECTORY. The Menu file MUST be named "_menu.html".
Creating new menus
You edit this menu the way you would any other page in Contribute: by making a connection to the page you want to edit. The file name MUST ALWAYS be named "_menu.html" with the name beginning with the underscore "_" character and using the standard .html extension. An example of such a url might be: http://mirror.www.umb.edu/budget_office/reports/_menu.html.Make sure you have all draft pages closed.
Step 1: Enter the URL for the menu in the address window
Step 2: Editing the menu
The menu is a series of bulleted lists. Click "Edit Page" to get into edit mode. You can type over existing copy and add new bullets. To add a new list simply hit RETURN and start entering the new menu item. Here is a sample of such a menu as seen in Contribute:
Step 3: Adding links to the menu items
You add links to menus in Contribute by linking to pages already created using the method in Adding Pages.
- Choose Insert > Link
- Select (Browse to Webpage) and route to the page already created.
Step 4: Publish your page
