Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Unleashed- P16

Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Unleashed- P16: The good news is Dreamweaver provides numerous windows, panels, inspectors, and toolbars forstreamlining the way you build websites. The bad news, unfortunately, is that Dreamweaver providesnumerous windows, panels, inspectors, and toolbars for streamlining the way you build websites. Why somany windows, panels, and so on, Dreamweaver is unprecedented in the feature set it provides, allowingdevelopers complete control when building websites and applications....
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Adobe Dreamweaver CS3 Unleashed- P16Nested TemplatesIn most cases, templates, combined with the flexibility of editable, optional, and repeating regions, areenough for most web development tasks. In some rare cases, however, single locked regions might be toorigid to be useful. Assume for a moment that Vecta Corp has decided to branch out into three separatecompanies in support of their three solutions (vProspect, vConvert, and vRetain). Although the Vecta Corpparent company still wholly owns the three subsidiaries, each of the three companies websites should havea slightly different look and feel than the parent companys. One way of achieving this is to create differenttemplates—one for the parent company site and one for each subsidiary company site thats a slightvariation (maybe a different color scheme) of the parent. The downside to this approach is maintainability. Ifthe parent site were to be customized, changes wouldnt trickle down to the four subsidiary sites becausetheyre based on entirely different templates. To fix this problem, we could create a nested template. Anested template works much like the name says: Its a template wrapped within the framework of a secondtemplate. In the preceding model, we could easily solve the maintenance issue by creating a template forour parent company and then create nested templates for our subsidiary sites. This way, if customizationsare made to the parent template, the changes trickle down to all the descendant pages. Because nestedtemplate development in Dreamweaver isnt all that intuitive, follow these steps to see how they work:1. Create a master template as you would normally. That is, create the structure of your site and then choose the Save As Template option from the File menu. In our case, we would create the header and logo that represents the main Vecta Corp site and save that as a template.2. Insert editable, optional, and repeating regions wherever you want variable content to appear in the template. Save the template when youre ready.3. Create a new document based on the template file by choosing File, New. Select Page from Template, Vecta Corp, and then choose the template that you created in steps 1 and 2 and click Create.4. With the template-derived page open, choose Insert, Template Objects, Make Nested Template. The Save As Template dialog appears.5. Enter a name for the nested template and click Save. A new nested template is created.6. In the new nested template, make any changes needed to the editable regions. These changes are locked in any document thats based off of this nested template.7. Add any new editable, optional, or repeating regions to the nested template. Editable, optional, and repeating regions added to nested templates appear as orange rather than in the default teal color.8. Save the file to complete the customization of the nested template.When youre ready to create template-derived pages from the new template, choose File, New. Select Pagefrom Template, Vecta Corp, and then choose the nested template, and click Create. Youll now be able tocustomize areas that were set aside as editable within the nested template, not the original parent.Templates and the Assets PanelAs your site grows, so too will the number of templates it employs. In general, overall management of sitetemplates is handled by the Templates category in the Assets panel, shown in Figure 14.18. Figure 14.18. Use the Templates category in the Assets panel to manage site templates. [View full size image]The Assets panel is separated into the following areas: Template list— Displays a list of DWT files (templates) in a defined site. The list provides the name of the template, its size in kilobytes, and the path (usually in the Templates folder of the defined site). Template preview— Displays a preview image of the template. Apply— Applies a selected template to an existing page in the Document window. This button is covered in more detail later in the chapter. Refresh Site List— Refreshes the template category to reflect changes made within the Files panel. New Template— Creates a new DWT file in the Templates folder of your defined site. When this button is clicked, a new template instance appears in the template list. Edit— Click this button to launch the selected template from the template list in a new Document window for editing. Delete— Deletes a selected template. Options menu— Displays advanced options for working with and managing templates. These options are outlined in more detail in the following discussion.For the most part, general management of site templates can be handled through the small button bar thatappears at the bottom of the Template category in the Ass ...