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Macromedia Dreamweaver has long been considered one of the best WYSIWYG web design programs available on the market. As the web evolved so did the program in trying to keep up with the changing technologies being used to develop more sophisticated websites. With the release of version eight, Macromedia has this program pointed towards more dynamic website development beyond standard HTML code.
In “Dreamweaver 8 with ASP, ColdFusion, and PHP: Training from the Source” from Macromedia Press and author Jeffrey Bardzell, you are taken on a tour of some of the new dynamic website development features that Dreamweaver 8 has to offer.
The Dynamically Developing Dreamweaver
The 508 page, 15-lesson book begins with your first sample website called Newland Tours. Here is where you will be introduced to the basics of this sample website and how this website will transform from static to dynamic as you continue through the rest of this book. The key thing to remember here is that with this static website, you will have to manually update each individual web page when you have to make a change across the entire site.
Now that you’re acquainted with your sample website, it’s time to pick up the pace and see what lessons two through five have to offer. In lesson two, you learn about the differences between using static HTML pages and creating content and publishing to a database. Here you will learn to make changes to your content using Dreamweaver’s find and replace feature. Then you’ll see how you can change your site’s appearance using cascading style sheets, how to create a template to place all of your new content and how to use invisible navigation. Lesson three shows you the purpose behind the use of dynamic websites. Lesson four demonstrates how you can pass data from one page to another. Lesson five teaches how you can send email through a web form on your website.
In lessons six through ten covers more of the details that will encompass your sample website. Lesson six shows how you can build a tour price calculator for site visitors to use. Lesson seven introduces you to the world of databasing through the use of Dreamweaver. Now this is probably the most important chapter in the book since this book is supposed to demonstrate the power of Dreamweaver. First you learn about the use of databases on the internet then moves onto the more sophisticated items such as database objects, relationships, database security, using MySQL (and why it’s important in the grand scheme of things), setting up the Newland Tours database and last but definitely not least…learn how to connect to the database. If that sounded like a lot to learn in lesson seven, it’s because there is. This point is crucial if you’re going to understand this database thing. Study this lesson thoroughly. Lesson eight shows you how to complete your price calculator that you started in lesson six. Lesson nine shows how to filter and display data from your new database. You will learn how to build an input page, generate URLs dynamically and how to set up an output page. A really cool thing you will learn in lesson nine is the ability to get your data into your page layouts dynamically. When you get this to work, you’ll wonder why you stayed with static HTML pages for so long. Lesson ten shows how you create tour descriptions for your Newland Tours website. Create recordsets, building descriptions, ALT tag attributes, recordset paging and how to pass data to other applications.
No site is complete without a search capabilities and lesson eleven shows how to build one using Dreamweaver. First you need to create the actual search page, then create the user interfaces, creating a query and implementing variables to provide the proper results for every search. Lesson twelve moves onto user authentication through registration pages. Create a custom log-in page, restrict access and even create a application program using ColdFusion. If this is going over your head, don’t fret. It went over mine too at first.
Now you have all this content in your database but now you have to manage all of it. Sounds like a tough project but you can do it using forms and Dreamweaver 8. Lesson thirteen shows how to create an administration section, how to format content in a database, creating a form interface and how to insert a record. Okay, now you have the frontend to the content but now you need some update pages. Lesson fourteen shows how you can make those secondary pages updateable as your master pages are given new content.
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