My drop down menus are behind my Flash

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Have you loaded up a Flash file and now your drop down menus are all a mess because they go behind your Flash instead of on top? Did you try changing the zIndex of your iFrame or try to put iFrames behind the menu to push it to the top? Does your drop down menu look like this?
wmodeBehind
But you wish it would look like this.
No wmode = transparent property
Well forget all the iFrame business and and feel relieved because all that is neccessary is to simply include the wmode parameter in your HTML. All you need is a little love and a simple tag and you should be fine.

To get started you should be using either swfObject or the Adobe AC_RunActiveContent.js to embed your Flash. I highly suggest the swfObject Flash Detection scripts because of how complete it is. swfObject combines Active content activation, Flash detection, Flash Express Install, and is search engine friendly.

Below you will find the wmode code for each method so that you can have menu systems like everyone else on the web.

Code – swfObject – var so = new SWFObject("myFlashMovie.swf", "mymovie", "200", "100%", "7", "#336699");

so.addParam("wmode", "transparent");
so.addParam("salign", "t");
so.write("flashcontent");

Code – AC_RunActiveContent.js- AC_FL_RunContent(‘codebase’,’http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=7,0,19,0′,’width’,’550′,’height’,’400′,’align’,’middle’,’src’,’myFlashMovie’,’quality’,’high’,’name’,’myFlashMovie’,’pluginspage’,’http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer’,’movie’,’myFlashMovie’,’wmode’,’transparent’);

Make sure that you have an even number of parameters with the example above or it will break it.Other links about the issue:

Stephanie Sullivan article on Community MX
Interakt Online Article
http://menumachine.com/kb/65
http://www.actionscript.org/forums/archive/index.php3/t-101350.html

3 thoughts on “My drop down menus are behind my Flash”

  1. Thanks Curtis. I had the same issue. Every other site I Googled told me to use the param and value pair which didn’t work. I put the line in the AC_FL_RunContent line and bingo, it worked.

    Cheers,
    Dave.

  3. Good tip Curtis.

    I had a similar problem when I built MyStickies. The notes would always appear behind the Flash. To fix that I had to look for all object and embed tags and give them a wmode if they didn’t already have one. This didn’t work at first because they were already in the page when I did that. So I also had to take the tag and reload it so to speak. In javascript it was something like tag.parentNode.replaceChild(tag, tag);

    Just thought that might be useful if anyone was having problems with Flash which was already loaded that they didn’t have control over. 🙂

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