Using Creative DW Menus Developer version with PHP, ASP or ColdFusion

With Creative DW Menus Pack Developer you can generate the menus using information from the database using PHP, ASP or ColdFusion. You can combine static menus with dynamic menus or create fully dynamic menus.

The database structure (PHP & MySQL example)

Before implementing a dynamic menu, you should make sure your database contains the necessary structure to build the menus. The dynamic labels and links will be stored in the database. Create a new table in your database and insert these following columns:

ID (unique) : used to identify each menu element (should be set as auto-increment)
parentID : used to identify the parent for each element
label : text to be displayed as label
link : button URL
target : the target of the URL
highlight indentifier - the parametters to identify the page as current and highlight it in the menu

Creating the recordset (PHP & MySQL example)

Now that we have our data ready we have to make it available for the menu. We do that by the using Dreamweaver recordsets. This is how you create a new recordset :

Open the “Server behaviors” panel. ( to open that panel go to “Windows->Server Behaviors” from the top menu )
Click on the “+” button and select recordset from the list
Select your connection to the database and then the table that you’ve created on step one.
Test the recordset to see if it displays the correct data from that table.

Recordset configuration

Configuring the menu (PHP & MySQL example)

Once you have the Recordset created, place your cursor somewhere inside the <body> tag and click on Insert Menu (Drop-down, Vertical or Tabbed). At this point you will have to decide if the menu will be dynamic with static entries or pure dynamic.

Dynamic and Static menu selection

If you have some static entries in the menu, select Dynamic + Static, then you should edit the structure of the static menu. Once this is ready, click on the parent of the dynamic menu (which can be any static menu entry or the site root) and click on Insert Dynamic Menu.

Insert Dynamic Menu

In the next interface fill in the fields accordingly to the database structure. Hower over the ? marks to see more information on each field.

Dynamic Screenshot

Click OK, then make all the menu customizations in the main screen. Once it's ready, insert it in the page.

Inserting the menu in multiple pages

As a best practice for inserting the menus in multiple dynamic pages, our advice is to create and insert the menu in a new page, then include the menu page in all the files that require the menu display.