Making popup windows in Golive 6


Making popup windows You know those really annoying little windows that appear when you're browsing, wanting you to gamble, buy a holiday, visit a porn site? Well, now you can do that too! You can make them appear by themselves, if you insist, but it's much better to let people choose to see a bigger version of an image, or read some extra text without leaving the page, and close the window when they're done. First we'll do it the standard way, then some variations. Make a page to appear in the popup window, save it in your website folder - mine is called popup.html. Put some suitable text or an image on your main page to trigger the popup, like this: open popup window
Make the text a link with the chain icon, and set it to the null link (option-3) like this: 'Title' refers to the title of the link, which is used by some browsers, including those for people with visual difficulties. You can name your link here if you want to. Do not use the target box at all, leave it empty.
Go to the action palette and add an action for Mouse click. Find your way to the Open Window Action .....
... then point and shoot to popup.html, like this: Where you see 'size', enter a width and height for your new window, depending on the content and how much space you want to give it. If you leave these set as zero, your new window will open full size. Uncheck any options you don't want everyone to have. Target Do you see a box by 'Target'? This is confusingly named, I think. It isn't the same as the 'target' options you may be used to for frames and you don't put _blank or anything similar - in fact you can safely leave it empty. You use it mainly if you will have more than one popup on a page. If you choose a word for 'target', and use the same target for each new window on the page, they will all reuse the same window rather than opening more and more all over the place. No spaces, no special characters, stick to lower case - I have used 'smallwindow' without the quotes.
Closing the popup In the page that will go in your mini-window, you can put some text for 'close the window' and attach a Close Window action (only Golive 6 has this installed ready). Many thanks to Nate Baldwin for his help with alternative ways to close a popup - find more of his excellent actions and tutorials here: One simple way to close the popup is to put 'close window' (without the quotes) on the page that occupies the popup window, make it a link and for the link type: javascript:self.close() or you can just assume people know how to close windows via the small box in the top left corner of the window.
But ... what if I want to decide where it appears on the page? .... why has my miniwindow got blank spaces top and left? ... how do I centre it? .... what about making it slide in from the left? .... I want it to appear without anybody clicking anything .... what if I want a link in there that closes the popup and makes a different page appear in the first window? ... I've got loads of images to attach to thumbnails, I don't want to make dozens of the dratted things .... read on .....