learn dream weaver - What you see is what you don't get? & Library items not updating

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Tue 27 Nov 2007, 09:40 Delegate Simon said...

Simon has attended:
Dreamweaver 8 Introduction course
Access Intermediate course

What you see is what you don't get? & Library items not updating

Hope you don't mind me asking two questions -

The first is that sometimes they way text is arranged in the design view does not relate to the way it shows on the website eg, a list of items neatly arranged one above another in a table in design view, appears with large, uneven gaps on the website - any ideas?

Also, I've had numerous problems getting library items to update on the pages where they appear - Dreamweaver goes through the motions of updating, but the pages don't actually change. A colleague who is a web designer says that he doesn't use library items because there are too many bugs which cause this sort of problem - is this the case? If so, I will abandon my plans to make extensive use of library items on my site.
Thanks, Simon

Tue 27 Nov 2007, 10:36 Trainer Rich said...

Include files

Hi Simon,

Unfortunately, Dreamweaver's design view doesn't always show a true rendering of what people will see in their browser. This is why they suggest always testing your page in all browsers and versions. If you can paste the URL of the page you are having problems with I may be able to help further with this (table spacing problem).

For your second question, I personally don't use library items because of the way they work. Say you have a library item across 200 pages of your site. Yes, you can make a change to your library item and Dreamweaver will (usually!) go through and update all the pages that use the library item. However, you then have to upload said 200 pages back to the server for the change to be live.

In my experience, I've found Include files to be a much quicker and better way to control repeated items throughout web sites.

You'll need ASP or PHP installed on your web server for this to work, but it's worth trying out if you're unsure. Only takes a minute or two.

I suggested the same thing to another delegate in this forum post.

Basically, you have an include file which contains only the HTML code you want to include on every page (you don't have the HTML, HEAD and BODY tags in an include file - just the <p> or maybe <table> tag that you want to include).

Save the file into an /include file on your server (create the folder if you haven't already).

Then whenever you want to show what's in the include file, include it on your web page using the following code.

For SHTML or ASP, use

or


For PHP, use function
include ("include/mymenu.php");
or
require ("/include/whatever.inc");

You may need to experiment to get the correct path (eg. could be "/include/file.htm" or "include/file.htm" etc. depending on which web page you are including from.

Hope this helps and saves you lots of time. It's sure saved me a lot of time!

Regards, Rich

PS. The reason Dreamweaver has library items instead of include files is that library items were created for web designers who didn't have any client-side scripting languages installed such as ASP or PHP. Library items allows them to do a global change throughout their site without that technology. The con is that you need to FTP upload all your files each time.