The pop-up menu on the left was created in GoLive 6 using the MenuMachine extension. It's just a quick navigation menu I created for easily navigating the rest of NoEnd Press according to contributors. While I personally prefer simple text links on my sites rather than fancy navigation devices, a lot of clients are asking for pop-up navigation menus these days and creating them can be a laborious task, even for someone fairly well-versed in JavaScript and DHTML. I think it would have taken me a VERY long time to code the equivalent menu by hand (maybe that's why I've always shied away from these kinds of menus?). With MenuMachine, it took about 5 minutes to get all the menu data and links entered. After that, another 5 minutes to tweak the interface and end up with a working navigation menu. This menu is basically a floating layer which can be positioned anywhere on the page, and uses DHTML to render in the browser. It works in version 4 and above browsers from Netscape and Microsoft.

Customizing the look and feel of your menus is where MenuMachine really shines because you can easily modify the way it looks and behaves without having to fuss around with any fancy code. With hand-coded solutions, the slighest change to the way the menus look can involve serious amounts of coding time. MenuMachine makes it easy to format the text and colors in your menu, and even allows you to include your own images. This means you are only limited by your imagination and design skills in making just about any menu you could think of.

MenuMachine's interface is even more impressive because it's logically laid out and I was able to figure out how to use it without reading any of the documentation, which hadn't been completed by the time I wrote this article. MenuMachine includes three main tabs in its interface, Edit, Format and Options. Each one let's you dig way deep into how you customize your menu system and again the UI is very intuitive and well-thought out. The live preview ability allows you to see the way your menu will appear before you publish. I havn't even begun to explore all of the different things I can do with MenuMachine, but it's only a matter of time.

The MenuMachine extension really shows the capabilities of the GoLive SDK as far as extending GoLive in a pratical way. It should inspire other developers to learn the SDK development tools and begin developing their own extensions. Rob wrote this extension entirely using the JavaScript-like scripting language documented in the SDK that ships with each copy of GoLive (you'll find the documentation in the GoLive SDK Documentation folder, or check out GoLive 6 Magic chapters 10 and 11 for a couple of tutorials Rob wrote on SDK development). However, developers can also use languages like C and C++ to create even more complex SDK extensions that run faster and integrate more tightly into the GoLive application.

MenuMachine is a real winner and definitely worth the $39 price tag. Since it'll save you several hours of coding on your first job alone, just bill for another hour or two of time on that job to justify its cost. After that it's paid for and will generate far more income that what you shelled out for it... You can find out more about MenuMachine and purchase a copy at Big Bang Extensions. Other SDK Extensions for GoLive can be found at the Adobe Xchange site.