To Dreamweave Or Not To Dreamweave

[dakotatech]

I have a site with TC since 2003. Plain old HTML stuff. I copied the pages from another site and changed the colors and content using Firstpage 2000. So my HTML skills are not the best but I get by. Now since I have some success with the site, I want to do some major changes. Stuff like changing one menu list and having it reflect on all my pages. And maybe some data lookup functions. I know I can do that with PHP and MYSQL but thats two more languages I would have to try to pick up the basics.

Would Dreamweaver be a better learning option, to get the job done?

Any and all opinions are welcome.

[TCH-Bruce]

First, welcome to the forums and family.

 

Sorry, don't know if Dreamweaver would help you with what you want to do. But I do know that using PHP includes would allow you to have the same content on all pages easily.

 

I'm sure others will be in to offer some guidance.

[TCH-Bruce]

Moving for organization

[TCH-Don]

Welcome to the Family

 

and your new home!

Yes php includes is just what you need and you do not have to learn another language, just paste one line of code where you want to include a file

<?php include("filename") ?>

thats it, just use your html skills but break up your html into modules that are reused on every page.

 

you may want to try the mini php turtorials from Total Choice hosting.

php mini tutorial by Jim Uni

and php mini part one tutorial by Jack (surefire)

 

this will make it easier to visualize, and once you use includes you will never go back.

 

To totally change your site means just modify the header and footer files.

 

And you do not have to change the page extension to php if you do not want to or if search engines have indexed your pages as.html

If you login to your cPanel, you will see an option for

Apache Handlers

click on the image or link,

in the window for Extensions type .htm .html

and in the Handler window type application/x-httpd-php

Select Add

 

now you can mix php include in your normal .html pages.

 

Then when you feel ready you can learn just a few more php things that will also help.

But for now just try to include your menu

then when you see how nice that is

try to create headers and footers like in the tutorials.

if you need more help, please ask.

 

We really are like family here.

So if you need anything,

just ask your new family!

We love to help

[Deverill]

I use Dreamweaver all the time and I love it.

 

But...

 

If you only want to make one change to update your entire site then you should go with PHP. It's not too difficult once you get the hang of it and while DreamWeaver does a great many things, the templates have one shortcoming.

 

With PHP, if you want to change your header you can update one file and then upload it. With the DreamWeaver templates you would need to update one file and upload every file that is changed. It's very inefficient in that way for the types of things people like us usually do.

 

(I still love DreamWeaver and recommend it as a "secondary goal" for the future perhaps.)

[andreaplanet]

As Don said a simple <?php include("filename") ?> is all what you need. And it's a great solution.

 

You just have to take care of the hyperlinks in the filename. If they are relative and you use the include code in php pages located in different directories then you will get broken links.

 

I too love use Dreamweaver (not the templates) with PHP (& MySQL).

[btrfld]

Sorry to be a party poop, but I have to weigh in on the Dreamweaver (or not) issue.

 

For my money it's a nice tool for playing around with the look of things when you don't know what you're looking for. However, there are two reasons to avoid it for actual coding:

 

1) If you look at the source it generates, you'll find it's very large and full of obscure code. By its very nature Dreamweaver is trying to solve all problems for all people without the user having to understand anything. Therefore it has to code everything to handle all possible situations, and the result is a very heavy page causing huge bandwidth usage even for a simple page.

 

2) Though I think it can do all the fancy things you want it to do, the effort it takes to understand how to use Dreamweaver would be better spent studying and understanding how the html/php/js code itself works. You can write leaner, simpler, faster-loading pages yourself in less time than it will take you to learn how to use Dreamweaver.

 

I think you would be much better off using TopStyle ($) or HTML-Kit (free), both good source editors with code highlighting and fine preview capabilities.

 

OK. End of rant.

[Deverill]

Funny how a "Dreamweaver template versus PHP includes" question turns into a WYSIWYG versus hand-coding. That beside the point, the code Dreamweaver generates depends upon your understanding of HTML, PHP, CSS, etc, and upon your understanding of how to use Dreamweaver itself.

 

I have several sites generated by DW and would daresay that the code is as heavy as I caused it to be. One site is a built-in CSS template thing and it's pretty heavy. In fact, several template-style pages have extra crud in them because DW has to mark what's part of the template and what's not.

 

Other sites, on the other hand, have almost zero extra code in them. All were created in DW but some were created with the "lazy-man's" features and others were made with care to get them right.

 

In fact, look at covenantwordchurch.org to see a real-life example of a site created completely in DreamWeaver. It has a couple of bytes that can be stripped but it is nothing noticeable even on a 56k dialup connection. Granted, if you use the fancy flashy buttons and drop menus it can get nasty, but they are nasty by nature.

 

With all that said, Jim's right that if you only have a few hours to learn only one thing then PHP/HTML is a better choice than any WYSIWYG editor but, as I said, DW would be a good future project if you decided to go that way.