On 12 Mar 2008, at 15:06, John-Paul Kernot wrote:
Should have said - using Fwy Pro
Ah, yes, footers… this looks like something I should answer,
because I have had similar problems myself.
Firstly, if you use absolute positioning on a Master Page for a
footer (sketching the item directly onto the Freeway page), the
footer will appear at the same place on every “instance” page of the
site. You can partly get around this by dragging the footer to the
right place on each individual page (this breaks the “Use Master
Settings” link but not the “Use Master Content” link). However this
still leaves the problem of what happens when the visitor to your
site increases the text size - the main content grows larger and
overruns the footer.
(Just checked that in Freeway 4 Pro - yes, it does happen.)
Another method I have heard of is to use an inline item: place your
cursor at the bottom of your main content item and then click
Insert>HTML Item, and then type your footer inside the HTML item.
However, this doesn’t work either, because inline items do not have a
Master Page link.
I understand why you want to put a footer on a Master Page: that way,
the footer will be the same on every page of your website, and if you
ever want to change the footer, you will only have to change the
Master Page version. And in fact, there is a way of doing it,
although it may look rather odd. By the way, I assume you are using
Freeway 4 Pro.
This is my method: On a Freeway master page, draw an HTML item, about
300 x 300px. In the Inspector, name it “content” (without quotes, as
usual). Then click the arrow next to Padding in the Inspector and
choose Custom. Set the padding to 1px at the top and 100px at the
bottom (the 1px at the top is a workaround, to stop Freeway 4
behaving unexpectedly).
Next draw another HTML item inside the first item (this will be your
footer) and name it “footer” in the Inspector. Under Dimensions in
the Inspector, click the six buttons until Left Inset, Right Inset,
Height and Bottom Inset are all selected. Enter the values Left Inset
0, Right Inset 0, Bottom Inset 0, Height 90px. This places the footer
at the bottom of the content item, in the padding space.
Now click outside both items, and click the content item and click it
again to show the text cursor. Enter a line of text, for example
“Master Page Content”. Press Enter (not Return) so the content item
is still selected. In the Inspector, double-click the Height value
(so it is highlighted in blue) and then delete it. Press Enter again,
and this time the content item will collapse to a single line, with
the footer underneath.
You now have a variable-height content item with a large padding
space at the bottom, plus a footer that sticks to the bottom of the
content item, sitting in the padding space (so it always stays clear
of the other content). You will also find that these two items
(content and footer) have independent Master Page links, so as you
build your website, with the content and footer appearing on every
page, you will be able to enter content on each page without breaking
the link for the footer. In fact you should only have to enter the
footer text once, on the Master Page.
Hope this all makes sense (it has taken about an hour to type). One
other thing I notice: this doesn’t seem to work in Freeway 5. But
that’s another story . . .
Regards
Graham Smith
Bury St Edmunds, UK
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