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Import a Menu

Objective Copy a menu (one that was created with Menukit) onto the active page from another page.

It is assumed you have completed the "Multi-level menu" tutorial and that your site includes a page named 'index.htm' that contains the menu. Your site should also contain a set of page stubs pg1.htm,... pg12.htm as described in that tutorial. In this tutorial we will copy the menu from index.htm onto each of the pages pg1.htm,... pg12.htm.


Download the support files for this tutorial.
  1. Create the initial menu page and page stubs.
    Follow the instructions in the 'Multi-level Menu' tutorial to create a menu with 12 items on a page named index.htm. Make sure you create all the page stubs as indicated in the tutorial

    or

    extract the initial setup from chkpt1.zip in the support files.

  2. Copy the menu from page index.htm to page pg1.htm.
    Open page pg1.htm. With pg1.htm as the active page, open the Menukit extension, Commands->Menukit.

    Press the Import menu buttonImport menu. In the file dialog that opens set the 'Relative To:' field to 'Document'. Browse to the file 'index.htm' and select it. Reply OK when asked if you want to import menu M1. Don't rename it - just leave the name as 'M1'.

    Press Save in Menukit to save the menu that you have just imported into pg1.htm.

    Exit Menukit. Save and close pg1.htm.

  3. Repeat step 2 for each of the other pages pg2.htm to pg12.htm
    Warning! Although we are using the Import menu button Import menu in this exercise to copy a menu onto all the pages in our site we do not recommend that you use it for this purpose in production websites.

    Open all the other pages in the website-> pg2.htm, pg4.htm,,,pg12.htm.

    Go through each page in turn and import the menu M1 into it as you did in step 2. (Again, don't rename the menu!).

    Finally, save and close M1.css.

    Upload the full website to your server and test.

In this tutorial we created a navigable website by copying a menu onto each page in the website.

Important! Copying menus onto all your site's pages like this is very tedious and error-prone. It is not recommended that you use the Import Menu facility to copy your menus like this.

Refer to the Templates tutorials to learn how to use a Dreamweaver template to deploy a menu to many pages in a more efficient and safer way.