Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

(Some of) the Actions, One by One

While events get the ball rolling, actions are, yes, where the action is. Whether it’s opening a 200 x 200-pixel browser window or slowly fading in a photograph, you’ll find an action for almost every type of interactivity you need.

In some cases, alas, the actions aren’t very good. Dreamweaver CS6 is still saddled with behaviors that Adobe created for (and hasn’t updated since) Dreamweaver CS4. Although Spry effects—part of the much-newer Spry Framework discussed in the last chapter—offer a fresh set of behaviors to play with, Adobe has only weeded out a few behaviors that aren’t very useful or that don’t work well. To be honest, you should skip most of these actions, but a few still worth trying are discussed below.

After you complete the steps required to set up an action as described on Phase 4: Adding Images and Text, the new action appears in the Behaviors panel, and your web page is ready to test. At this point, you can click the event’s name in the panel, where you can use the drop-down menu to change the event that triggers the action, as shown in Figure 13-16.

Spry Effects

Spry effects are a relatively new addition to Dreamweaver’s arsenal of behaviors. They first appeared in Dreamweaver CS3 and are sophisticated visual effects that can do things like highlight elements on a page, make a photo fade in, or shake an entire sidebar of information as though it were in an earthquake. They’re mostly eye candy and work well when you want to draw ...