New to Flare - Top nav with side menu proxy

[phillips311]

Good morning.
I am fairly new to MadCap so if I am not speaking the correct lingo, I apologize. I have been working on a Flare project since February. We have changed the layout several times to fit the needs of our end user. We decided on the Sunset template which we really like. We have edited to enough to where it is about near perfect.... except.... we have way too many topics with parent and child pages. I think it does not flow correctly and believe the side menu needs some dropdowns (similar to how they are with the side navigation).

I have researched and tried everything that I could think of. I even downloaded a new template to see if I could create the same stuff into a side navigation project and just got frustrated as the responsive layout was not working in my favor.

What are some options (if any) that I could implement? I have ran out of ideas and just stumped. If I need to use the side navigation, that is totally fine but I have no idea how to merge the project together without messing it up. I have over 100 hours into this project.

Thank you.

[mdgates]

The hierarchy of the side menu of a HTML5 Help system corresponds to the hierarchy of the target's TOC. Maybe I'm not understanding the issue, though. Can you attach a screenshot of what's going wrong?

[NorthEast]

The side menu in the Sunset template is a "menu proxy", and a menu proxy can't display the TOC with expanding/collapsing sections like you can with the side navigation skin.
So if you need expanding/collapsing sections in your TOC navigation, then you'd need to use a side navigation skin.

[minicyclist]

You can achieve this but not with Flare out of the box. We're using a top navigation skin and also wanted a collapsible side menu. To do this I used SmartMenus: https://www.smartmenus.org/

There are other threads that discuss this, but take a look at our docs: https://learn.foundry.com/modo/14.1/con ... orial.html and If that's the kind of thing you're looking for, I can provide more detail.

One of Flare's weak spots is the UI customisation options, so if you need to stray from a template it makes it quite difficult. I'd love to see a proper template designer. In the meantime, our solution might help.

[ChoccieMuffin]

I'm going through exactly the same pain - my internal customer likes the Soledad front page, but wants the functionality of a side-nav template like Cardiff. A while back I customised Cardiff to look more or less right, and in another thread the wonderful Nita suggested I should edit the skins and get the top-nav front page looking the way I want it in one project, and get the side-nav topics looking the way I want them in another project, and then import the side-nav skin from my Cardiff project into my Soledad project, build the output using the imported skin and see what happens.

It worked after a fashion, but when I first tried it my home page had a side-nav menu on it - not what I was after at all, and the top-nav menu headings have disappeared from my front page.

To get rid of the side-nav menu, I figured I needed to add something to the stylesheet that I use for my home page that has "display: none;" attached to whatever is displaying that side-nav menu. This is what was in the Cardiff home page stylesheet:

Code: Select all

html.home-topic .sidenav-wrapper	/*Removes the side navigation from the home topic*/
{
	display: none;

I tried copying that bit (which turns off the side-nav menu) from the Home page stylesheet in the side-nav template (Cardiff) to the top-nav template (Soledad) stylesheet but it didn't quite work, so I dug a bit further.

Thing is, when I look in the Soldedad stylesheet, there isn't "html.home-topic" but "html.home-page" later on in the stylesheet, so I changed that bit I added to this:

Code: Select all

html.home-page .sidenav-wrapper	/*Removes the side navigation from the home topic*/
{
	display: none;

And I was pleasantly surprised to find, it worked! (There's another bit in the stylesheet that also turns off the side-nav menu in search results, so I added that too.)

Next problem I'm going to try to solve is to see if I can get the top-nav menu back, but only on the home page. More investigation required, but I hope that little gem gets you somewhere.

The problem is that the stylesheets were probably developed by different people and so the terms used might be slightly different, but with a bit of detective work you may be able to identify what's what. I found it really useful to generate the output, then do "view source" and "inspect" in Google to try to identify the generated code behind the bit I didn't like.

Good luck, and I'll update if I can figure out how to turn the top-nav back on, just for that front page.