Dreamweaver CS6: The Missing Manual

Editing Library Items

You’ll appreciate the real power of Library items when it’s time to make a change. When you update the original file in the Library, all the pages graced with that linked item update, too.

Start by opening the Library, as described on Creating and Using Library Items. Then:

1. Open the Library item you want to edit.

   You can do this by double-clicking the Assets panel’s Library item, by highlighting it and then clicking the Edit button (Figure 18-4), or by highlighting a Library item on a web page and then, in the Property Inspector, clicking the Open button (Figure 18-5). (You can also open the Library item file—an .lbi file—in the Library folder of your site’s root by double-clicking it in the Files panel.)

   Dreamweaver opens what looks like a normal web page, but it contains only the text, graphics, or other elements of the Library file.

2. Edit away.

   A Library item is only a selection of HTML, it’s not a complete web page. That means you must not add page properties, like a title or background color, or one of the behaviors discussed in Chapter 13. (Dreamweaver actually lets you do this, but that adds invalid HTML to the Library item as well as to every page that uses that Library item.) Also, you can insert Library items only in the body of a web page, so stick with objects that would normally appear in the document window, such as links, images, tables, and text. Don’t add any code that appears in the head of a web page, such as Cascading Style Sheets, meta tags, behaviors, ...