Would someone be nice enough to let me bounce stupid questions off them about dreamweaver?

1) I made a page, then added frames. The frames saved individually. How do I get them all back together after I close out then open DW up again? They are all coming up in seperate panes.

I would like to try to view them all together as 1 page and can not find anyhting on this.

(i am stupid, i know, just please help me)

5/18/2006 3:48:32 PM

The frames are their one pages and then there is the master page which contains all the frames (i.e. mainpage.html, mainframe.html, sideframe.html, topframe.html). FYI, no one uses frames anymore.

5/18/2006 3:51:56 PM

^instead of frames, how should I set it up?

5/18/2006 3:55:56 PM

What are you trying to do that needs frames? Do you really need to use frames? Use the dreamweaver template feature if it's just a matter of repetitive content used for site navigation.

5/18/2006 3:57:56 PM

The beauty of dreamweaver is the very nice use of Template. Templates are very powerful where you can keep common headers, footers, menus, etc, accross all pages on your site.
Create a page in DW with your "common" attributes, like your header and footer, and leave a space blank where you want the content to go that will be different on each page. Then go to File > Save As Template. It will probably say something about "there are no editable regions" - that's fine for now, just save it. Now, you will create some editable regions, which is where the content for each page will go. Go to Insert > Templates > Editable Region, or something like that.

that is the very short version of it - after the template is created you can go to File > New and instead of selecting just a normal new HTML file, click the Templates tab, and you will see the template you jsut created. Then you can save that as a new page and edit the "editable region". The beauty is that you can create tons of pages based on this template, then if you need to change something in the template (like a header option or menu item) you just edit the template, and it will automatically update all your pages.
Of course there's a lot more to explain, and there are tons of very nice template options. For example, I created this page for my wife using DW templates, nested templates, editable attributes, etc - very nice and easy to update - http://alishalion.com/

5/18/2006 5:01:24 PM

^

I like that site a lot.


How long did it take you? I'd like to do something very similiar


What's everyone's favorite Dreamweaver tutorial site?

Quote :

"Results 1 - 10 of about 26,500 for "Dreamweaver MX tutorial"."

[Edited on May 18, 2006 at 10:49 PM. Reason : ]

5/18/2006 10:47:39 PM

^^Looks nice and clean. I need to overhaul my site. I like the gallery integration.

5/18/2006 11:18:00 PM

^^ full disclosure: the site is based on a free Wordpress template called Prozac - http://www.wpdemo.kaushalsheth.com/?p=15
Obviously I made a lot of updates that took a long time to perfect - the colors and header, most notably the addition of the 2nd navigation bar, the sidebars, etc. So the site is fully customized to how I want it, but the structure was taken from the Wordpress template.

The site creation and maintenance is in 3 steps, which I would like to consolidate into 1 or 2 if possible, but haven't figured out how yet.
1st, there is a Wordpress component, which maintains the blog and the front-page "News" section. The News section is actually just another Wordpress blog category. I did a lot of hacking on the wordpress template structure and now whenever a post is assigned to the "news" category, it shows up on the front page, where all other posts show up on the blog page. You'll see that they contain different options for the headers.

2nd, there is the Gallery2 integration. I started off using the excellent WPG2 (Wordpress, Gallery2) plugin - http://wpg2.galleryembedded.com/ - i use that plugin on my own site here and it works great - http://joelion.com/gallery/europe/germany (actually, the top level, /europe, is not working right now.... i'm not sure why). With WPG2, you install a basic stripped down theme on Gallery2, then WPG2 embeds the Gallery into your Wordpress theme. So this way you can just manage your WP theme, and G2 follows. For alishalion.com I wanted some more flexibility, so I manage the G2 theme outside of Wordpress, and just sync it with my Dreamweaver theme.

3rd, I took the WP teamplate and converted it to a Dreamweaver template and a series of nested-templates. That's how I manage all the static pages like "profile" and "schedule", and the pages with submenus like "germany" and "kitchen".
So…. To update a major part of the theme for that site, i now have to update it in 3 places - the DW template, the WP template, and the G2 template. I would like to figure out a way where they can all pull from one source, but i don't know if it's possible/worth the effort.

The latest site I built I decided to use Wordpress as a CMS or sorts, so I don't have to manage any of it in Dreamweaver. This site - http://www.nickywangsgard.com/ - is entirely managed in Wordpress. I use the same "News" and "Blog" hack to seperate different categories, use Wordpress "Pages" to mange the static content like Profile and Links, then use WPG2 for the Gallery integration. Therefore with this site, I truly only have a single template to update, and it updates the entire site. Again for full disclosure, the overall theme was modified taken from http://andreasviklund.com/ and modified to my liking.

For anyone looking to get into building sites, i would strongly recommend one of two options:
1) Use Wordpress as a CMS to manage all the content on your site, including blogs, galleries and static pages. It has a myriad of themes and plug-ins to make almost anything possible.
2) If you want more control over the site (like if you have lots of custom PHP, or have crazy pages that you can't create in Wordpress), then I would still recommend finding a free Wordpress theme and pulling it into Dreamweaver then customizing it. There are 1000+ free WP themes, so you'll almost surely find something that looks and functions somewhat close to what you want. By using a pre-built WP theme, you'll have the site structure already built for you and lots of nice CSS already done. Often, you can just go in and change some colors, adjust some fonts, replace the header image, and voila - new site! Here are hundres of WP themes
http://tinyurl.com/jpjw5
http://wpthemes.info/themes/
http://codex.wordpress.org/Using_Themes/Theme_List
http://www.alexking.org/index.php?content=software/wordpress/themes.php
http://themes.wordpress.net/
Or other free design sites in general (non-wordpress) http://www.oswd.org/

For everyone who is going to jump in and say using free templates is cheating, demeaning to artists, cheapens web design…… suck it. Using and modifying templates is a great way to 1) get a site up and running quickly, 2) making a site design solid and consistent, and 3) learning new techniques yourself and fine-tuning your own design capabilities. Using techniques like I've described, there's no reason anyone, even those without a trained eye for graphic or web design, can't have a nice looking and functional site that doesn't look like it was made in 1998 using Frontpage, unlike, oh, i don't know….. http://www.ncsuliving.com/

[Edited on May 19, 2006 at 10:11 AM. Reason : .]

5/19/2006 10:10:38 AM