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Working with the Spry Menu Bar Control

It's time to get familiar with one of the major new features of Dreamweaver – Spry.  This is the name given to the new AJAX framework in Dreamweaver CS3 which enables you to drag a series of useful predefined controls directly on to the page.  One of these controls is the Spry Menu Bar and this tutorial is going to look at how to use it for best effect and how to use another of the Spry controls – the Spry XML Data Set – in conjunction with it to produce a dynamic and attractive navigation menu quickly and easily.

Need to create all kind of great web site navigation menus? Cascading Drop down Menus, Mega Menus, Popup or Context Menus. Menus that have great display animations, are CSS based and fully cross browser compatible, which makes them search engine friendly?

Then you need the Universal CSS Navigation Menu

Spry Chat Part Two

This article is the second and the final one in the series on building online chat application using Dreamweaver CS3 Spry framework. While Part One was all about Spry and building the interface foundation this time around we will concentrate on making the interface a little more attractive, as well as developing the server-side functionality required to send and receive chat messages. Finally we will set up appropriate file permissions to make sure our application can read and write the information to/from a file on the server.

PHP is used for all back-end operations in our chat application (without any database functionality involved).

Working with the YUI Calendar Control

In a recent article, I looked at making one the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) utilities work for you in the form of a news scroller.  In this article, I'm going to explore the functions of the of the library's controls – the Calendar control. The utilities provide different types of functionality, which you are free to implement in whatever way you want. The controls are slightly different, consisting of a set of predefined objects that enable user input and should be used pretty much as they are. They are still highly configurable however and you have a broad range of options when adding them to your pages.

Spry Chat Part One

I think many would agree that the most exciting news about Dreamweaver CS 3 is the cool Spry framework.  If you don’t know what that is then here is my quick definition:
Spry is a framework for building basic AJAX functionality in Dreamweaver.

If you want to learn more about the concept I would suggest referring to Dreamweaver Help (that is if you own Dreamweaver CS 3), which I won’t be citing here, or visiting Adobe web site.

This two-part series is designed as a hands-on tutorial in which you will build a chat application utilizing Spry Data and Validation features.