Free - Create a local SQL Server connection and read data to a page using Dynamic Tables

Are you ready to start building dynamic sites that get their data from tables in the database? Then check out another great tutorial from Richard Mariner that shows you how to get started.

Navigation – DOM Style, Part 1

As the final part of my series on Navigation, we’re going to take a different approach and use the Document Object Model (DOM) to tap into properties and methods already inherent in our document.  This is a navigational approach not often used, but one worthy of discussing.  First, we’ll talk about the theory behind this approach and, in the second half of the article, we’ll create page navigation based on what we’ve learned.  Let’s get to it.

Free, Creating a static site in Dreamweaver

Introduction

Prevent problems with extensions or lost files and folders. Create your site in Dreamweaver the right way. This video shows you how to do it in less then two minutes!

Navigation Bars in Dreamweaver 8

Central and highly important in any web site is the site’s navigation.  It can consist of anything from simple text links to full blown flash navigation bars.  The most important part of navigation is that it be easy to follow, that it makes sense to the site’s visitor and that it’s more than flashy buttons that just “show off”.  In this article, I will show you how to use the Dreamweaver native navigation bar.

Using Contribute to Edit Your Website

What is Contribute?

Contribute is desktop software that you install on a Mac or Windows machine. It costs $149 (or less in quantity) and allows a non-technical user to edit web pages. With minimal training almost anyone who is competent with e-mail, word processing and web browsing can edit existing web pages.

Contribute: Part 2

Administering a Contribute Site

By Zac Van Note

With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility

A large part of the power of Contribute comes from the ability to administer sites at a very granular level. This means you can allow one user access to modify text only in a specific area of a specific page. You can allow other users to edit any page within a certain folder, and you can allow other users to have much broader access to edit and publish pages across multiple folders or sites. 

All of this power falls under the Administration controls in Contribute. You can access these controls from a link in Dreamweaver’s Site setup dialog box, but you must have a full version of Contribute installed to configure and administer your site and its users. In Part 1, we discussed how to set up a Contribute-friendly site in Dreamweaver. In Part 2, we’ll discuss how to setup the site in Contribute, create users or groups with specific permissions and get users connected to the site.

Contribute: Part 1

Setting up a Contribute Site in Dreamweaver 8 and Contribute 3

Content may be king, but only if the content is up-to-date and relevant. Do Search Engine Tips from 1998 have any validity today? Not much. How about Mac Rumours about the cool new toys Steve Jobs will unveil at the 2005 MacWorld Expo? Who cares? It’s long past and everyone’s seen an iPod Shuffle by now. These are just a couple examples of top results I clicked on from recent web searches in Google. I was looking for current information, not old news. It’s not that Google is to blame. These sites are just out-of-date. For historical reasons, I suppose, they don’t want to delete pages with old information, but for most purposes these out-of-date pages do no one any good.

So what’s the solution? Well, I don’t pretend to have one to solve the out-of-date content across the entire web, but there are ways that your sites can stay timely and useful for your site visitors. Just update your content frequently! That was easy. Article over.

But wait! How do we update content frequently? Of course, that’s the tricky part. Luckily there are a number of content management solutions on the market that make updating content as easy as possible. In this article, I’ll concentrate on Macromedia Contribute, but we’ll also take a quick look at some other types of Content Management Systems (CMS) that may also suit your needs.

Free! Dreamweaver 8: Part of the Family

We made it!  This both Number 15 and Number Last in our series on Dreamweaver 8!  For this last look at the new Generation Next, I wanted to show you a quick glimpse of the rest of the family:  the incomparable Macromedia Studio 8!  All will be available as trial downloads (and purchase downloads as well) by the time you read this article, and I can’t wait for you to meet them all!

You already know Dreamweaver 8 through this series.  Fireworks 8 is its little sister and does for web graphics what Dreamweaver does for page coding.  The new version features blend modes, new pop up menus, new panels and gadgets all designed to make your web graphics award-winning and wonderful!

Big Brother Flash Professional has forever changed the way we see video on the web.  Complete with support for alpha channels in both the tool and the player, there is nothing better on the market short of a television editing bay and they cost somewhere around $35,000.  And that’s just one thing it does!  Flash has outflashed itself with this one!

And little baby Contribute has joined her Studio family to complete the picture with site maintenance abilities that are second to none.  She replaces Freehand in the Studio, making it a complete web application software suite.

And then there are the goodies.  Flash Paper for quickly creating Flash documents or PDF ones.  Flash Video Encoder for creating Flash video to fit on your web pages.  Cold Fusion Server 7 for testing your dynamic sites to make sure they’re ready for prime time.  And HomeSite + .. still the best code only tool out there! 

This article talks about Family .. this article tells you why you need to get to know them .. and this article thanks you for allowing me to be a part of your reading program for awhile. 

See you on the forums!

Nancy Gill

Team Macromedia for Dreamweaver 8/MX2004/MX/UltraDev

This article is part of the new interactive e-book; Dreamweaver Crystal Gazer: The Power Of Dreamweaver 8

Dreamweaver 8: Little Known Goodies

During this series, we have learned a lot about Dreamweaver 8.  We have discussed the product in general, we have taken a general look at its features, a comprehensive at its CSS ability and now we are winding up a walk through the application aspect of the program.  This article represents a bit of a departure from the norm.  This article is the culmination of my trips through the menus, the panels, the documentation and general just click, clicking around in the program to see what kinds of little things I could find that I thought was interesting, helpful or just downright different. 

I hope you’ll enjoy learning about some of the little things as much as you have enjoyed the major features.  I can’t say enough about Dreamweaver 8 and how it raises the bar for both the web designer and developer. 

As a look ahead, our final article, Article 15, will focus on Dreamweaver 8 as a part of the Macromedia Studio 8, giving you a look at the total web development process.  Macromedia, more than any other company, has positioned its software solutions to the various pieces of the web development puzzle to work together seamlessly and brilliantly.  You won’t want to miss this informative look at innovation in software design, Macromedia style.

This article is part of the new interactive e-book; Dreamweaver Crystal Gazer: The Power Of Dreamweaver 8

Dreamweaver 8: Possibilities in Application of XML

In the previous article, we started our journey into the world of applications with Dreamweaver 8.  We talked about PHP5 and the new support built into the product.  Then we turned our attention to the fantastic XML integration built into Dreamweaver 8.  In Dreamweaver MX 2004, we had the ability to import a schema so the custom tags would be available in code hinting and completion and this was pretty cool; certainly sped up work flow.  And we had the ability to create an XML document; as long as you typed it, but of course you had the custom tags if you had imported the schema, so it wasn’t all that bad.

Dreamweaver 8: Applications

During the first two-thirds of this intensive look at the new and improved Dreamweaver 8, we have looked at the tool and its new features, we have explored the CSS-ability of the new version and now it is time to look at Dreamweaver 8 as an Application builder. 

Our last version, Dreamweaver MX 2004, was rightfully dubbed the “CSS edition” but that was a good thing because CSS to that point in time we sadly lacking and most serious developers turned to a 3^rd party tool to create their CSS and then just attached it to Dreamweaver.  The MX 2004 version made great strides in this respect, but it did not replace the 3^rd party tool in every respect.  It is my opinion that Dreamweaver 8 does so.  So we were right in giving a fair amount of attention to CSS in this version as well.

This article is part of the new interactive e-book; Dreamweaver Crystal Gazer: The Power Of Dreamweaver 8

Dreamweaver 8: Buried in the Basement

Part 10, “Buried in the Basement” was written because it had to be.  It is the one departure from the theme of this series, or rather, I should say “semi-departure”.  Not everything discussed in this article is new with Dreamweaver 8, but I felt it was important to do a chapter like this if for no other reason than to invoke user awareness.

The Results Panel, or “basement” as I like to call it, is by some standards, “boring” because it doesn’t design, it doesn’t create the pages and so it lies down there under the Property Inspector, largely unnoticed and massively underutilized.  But it contains within its tabs a series of very powerful utilities designed to help you find problems, validate pages, look for errors, batch process word replacement and print a stack of reports that I promise you, once you use a couple of times, you will not do without in the future. 

This article is part of the new interactive e-book; Dreamweaver Crystal Gazer: The Power Of Dreamweaver 8