Dreamweaver MX: The Missing Manual

Template Tutorial

In this tutorial, you’ll create a template for the Horoscopes section of the Cosmopolitan Farmer Web site. Then you’ll build a page based on that template and enjoy an easy site-wide update courtesy of Dreamweaver’s templates feature.

Note

The tutorial in this chapter requires the example files from this book’s Web site, http://www.sawmac.com/dwmx/. Click the Tutorials link to go to the tutorials page. Click to download Template Tutorial—Mac Files or Template Tutorial—Windows Files, depending on the kind of machine you’re using.

After your browser downloads and decompresses the files, you should have a DWTemp (short for Dreamweaver Templates) folder on your computer, containing the Web pages and graphics needed for this tutorial. If you’re having difficulties, the Web site contains detailed instructions for downloading the files you’ll be using with this book.

Creating a Template

This tutorial guides you through the creation of a template, the creation of a page based on that template, and then an editing and auto-update procedure.

These instructions assume that you’ve downloaded the necessary tutorial files, as described on page 25, and defined a site using the DWTemp folder as your local root folder (for information on defining a site, see page 426).

1. Open the Site window by pressing the F8 key.

2. In the Site window, find and double-click the page horoscope.html (it’s in the root folder).

   It’s usually easier to start with an already-designed Web page and then save it ...