NetObjects Fusion HTML Sitemap

© Kai Toedter 1999-2002
Version v1.2
07/14/02

Introduction
A sitemap is useful if you want to navigate over your whole or parts of your web site. If the build-in NetObjects Fusion Java sitemap does not fit your needs, maybe this is the right solution for you. HTML Sitemap is a highly customizable NOF component that creates HTML sitemaps automatically for you. You can view a few examples of HTML Sitemaps.

New Features and Bug Fixes in Version 1.2
Bug fixes:
- Tree formatting bug that occurred if the sitemap page texts were not the page titles
- Tree node display bug that occurred if all the children of a node were excluded from the sitemap

New features:
- Sitemap images are now optimized for small sizes without quality loss
   - you save up to 9 KB per sitemap page
- Now pages that are not published by NetObjects Fusion will NOT appear in the generated sitemap
- Now external pages (or pages not generated by NetObjects Fusion)
   can be easily integrated into the sitemap (see below)

License
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation. If you like and use it, just let me know. If you find any errors or things you don't like, please contact Kai Toedter.

Installation
The HTML Sitemap component works with NetObjects Fusion 5.x, MX and 7. Unzip the file HtmlSitemap-1.2.zip in your NetObjects Fusion components directoryand start NetObjects Fusion. In page view in the "View/Toolbars/Component Tools" menu you find the entry “toedter.com Components”. Select this entry. Now you see the toedter.com component palette with the HTML Sitemap 1.2 icon. Use the component like any other NOF component.

Properties
The HTML Sitemap component has a few properties to customize the output:

Property

Value

Description

Node Text

Title (Default)

The link text of a HTML Sitemap entry.

Banner

Navigation Button

Node Colors

Tree Depth (Default)

The node color changes with the tree depth.

Subtree

Every subtree below Home gets its own color.

Single Color

All nodes have the same color, yellow by default.

Font

Default

The font of the link text of a HTML Sitemap entry. The default font of the HTML Sitemap component is “Default”, so the page font is used. This is the best value if you use CSS.

Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

Times New Roman, Times, serif

Courier New, Courier, mono

Georgia, Times New Roman, Times, serif

Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif

Font Size

None, -7 .. +7

The font size of a HTML Sitemap entry. The default font size is "None", then no size tag is generated. This is the best value if you use CSS.

Image Directory

<directory>

The component provides 3 image directories: “3dShadow” for nice 3D icons (looks good with white background), “3d” without shadow (useful for colored background) and “Solid” for single color icons. If you want to use your own icons, copy one of these directories into the ..\HtmlSitemap-1.2\nof\styles directory, rename it and change the icons for your needs. To change the value of the Image Directory property you have to select a file in a subdirectory of the ..\HtmlSitemap-1.2\nof\styles directory.

Publish Directory

htmlsitemap

The directory where the image files for the HTML Sitemap are stored. The default is “htmlsitemap”. You might want to change this to “assets\images” or any other directory you prefer.

Root Node

Default

Here you can specify the root node of your HTML Sitemap. The default value “Default” is the home node. This is a useful feature if your site is a multi-language site and you want to have a separate sitemaps for every language.

Excluded Nodes

 

Here you can specify all pages that you want to exclude from your sitemap. You can specify several comma-separated pages, use the page name, not the page title! If an excluded page is the parent of a subtree, all child nodes are excluded too. Since version 1.2 pages that are not published by NetObjects Fusion are excluded automatically, they don't have to be put in the excluded node list anymore.

Link Target   Here you can specify a target frame for the sitemap links. This might be useful if you use frames or want to open the links in a different window.

Integrating external Pages into the Sitemap
If you want to integrate pages in your sitemap that are not generated by NetObjects Fusion, you can do it now very easily! This is very useful if parts of your site are not generated by NetObjects Fusion and you want to integrate them into you sitemap. Just create a dummy page in your site structure, where you want to see an external page in your sitemap. Check the "Don't publish" property of the page. Change the page name to "Sitemap:<your link>" (without the quotation marks) , e.g. to Sitemap:href://"www.toedter.com" or Sitemap:"../myPage.html". You might also want to change the page title, banner or navigation button text. Regarding to the Node Text property, this would be the external page's text in the generated HTML sitemap.

Tips
NetObjects Fusion generates an image "htmlsitemap.gif" for every HTML Sitemap component (you might find them in the assets\images\autogen directory). Edit the properties to never publish these images. If you want to have trees with more than 5 colors, add files leafNodeX and nodeX to the image directory where X is a number. The numbers must be increasing from 1 to n for n colors.

Download
You can download a zip file, containing all the sources, libs and documentation at www.toedter.com/download/HtmlSitemap-1.2.zip (95 KB).

History

Version

Description

1.0

Initial Version

1.1

Link target for use in frames
Bug fixes
GNU Lesser General Public License
Build with ant

1.2

Bug fixes
Sitemap images optimized for small size without quality loss
Now pages that are not published will NOT appear in the sitemap
Now external pages can be integrated easily into the sitemap