Dan's Shorts

VC Star Article - Front and Center

While I was in Ojai recording the Dreamweaver 8 Beyond the Basics title for lynda.com there were some reports from the Ventura County Star writing an article on lynda.com. They wanted to take a few photos of someone doing a recording, and they ended up using a shot of me on the front page of the Business section of their February 15th article. See mom and dad, I really do do real work :). Click the image for a larger version.

Read the article here (requires free registration).

New Template Updating Feature in DW 8.01

With little fanfare (blow your trumpets please!) Macromedia Adobe introduced a new feature in the Dreamweaver 8 updater regarding template paths (see the full technote for more information).

What this means for us lowly developers, is that if we're using includes or folder specfic images and such inside Dreamweaver, we can have each file in a directory include another file inside the child page's directory... As I read that again it doesn't make a lick of sense, so here's an example:

Let's assume that every folder in your site relates to a specific section. And let's assume that you want to have a section image unique to each section. When you're looking at the rum section in the /rum folder, you want /rum/section.gif to display. When you're perusing the whiskey section at /whiskey/index.cfm, you want /whiskey/section.gif to display. A simple request right? Well it wasn't an easy task to accomplish before the latest updater.

Now, if you link to any file inside the Templates directory from a .dwt file, then when child pages are updated, any links to pages inside the Templates folder will not be rewritten. So let's assume the following directory structure:

wwwroot
|--Rum
|  |--index.cfm
|  |--section.gif
|--Templates
|  |--SiteLayout.dwt.cfm
|  |--section.gif
|--Whiskey
   |--index.cfm
   |--section.gif

Inside SiteLayout.dwt.cfm you have an <img> tag like so:

<img src="section.gif" />

Now, when you create a child page from the SiteLayout.dwt.cfm file, that image link won't be <img src="../Templates/section.gif"> as it would have been in Dreamweaver 8.0. Instead, it will be <img src="section.gif />, which means that each page based on the template will link to the section.gif file in its own folder.

Now that's just good stuff I tell you... If you don't like that feature however, you can turn it off by editing your Site Definition, clicking on the Templates category, and unchecking the "Don't rewrite document relative paths" checkbox. This will revert Dreamweaver 8.01 to Dreamweaver 8's default behavior.

Have fun!

Another one bites the dust...

I finished up the new Dreamweaver 8 Beyond the Basics title for lynda.com on Friday. After 4 solid days in a little sound-proof room, it's time to head back home and catch up on all of the emails and questions from readers. The Beyond the Basics title covers advanced template usage, building multi-column CSS layouts, using some rapid coding techniques in Dreamweaver you might not have known where there, as well as a chapter on getting your feet wet with dynamic development in Dreamweaver 8.

Before I left I also recorded a few pick ups for the Dynamic Development with Dreamweaver 8 title, which should hopefully be released in the next week or two.