29
Replies
Question: Indeed I tried with this process while keeping the same header, menu and footer during navigation and therefore make modifiable that the "content" part but I realize that the entire pages are reloaded each time: - (((it's not very pretty, nor fluid!) in fact, what I would like is to really fix the header, menu and footer. (I noticed on other sites (having the same configuration), it seems more fluid and with each choice of the menu, the pages don't seem to reload every time (maybe they use CMS (Wordpress, Joomla, Wix, ..) ??
No, that approach is called SPA (Single Page Application) the page doesn't reload when you click on a navigation link, the content is loaded into the 'template' page, so it looks seamless.
To build a true SPA you'll need to use javascript, php or some other language.
This thread looks a bit out of context as there seems to be posts deleted.
=========
It seems out of context because this is part 2 of a long discussion that got out of control and had to be locked. Hopefully, it won't happen again with this one.
Just use the Template.dwt approach and ignore all the other noise. As you gain more experience, you'll learn what works best for you. As you gain more experience, you'll likely move to more advanced (scripted) solutions.
We can lead the horse to water but we can't make him drink. If the OP won't use server-side scripts, there's nothing more we can say. This is not our problem. And there's no reason to bust an artery over it.
By @Nancy OShea
I agree, but I dont provide poor advice, sorry, just for convienience sake. I've been there, seen it, done it and Im trying my best to get others (that are serious developers) to avoid it.
I'll concede that IF someone is new to Dreamweaver, is putting a website of say 10-15 pages together, has an overwhelming 'fear' of using some simple php/javascript then the 'damage' is not going to be serious if they use dwt files. At that level its not going to make much difference.
However once a website grows, needs to be flexible enough to scale up, dwt files come with a lot of issues, which if you spend a few hours learning about using simple server or even vanilla javascript include files will pay dividends in the long run.
As you say its up to the individual in the end. Every one learns by their mistakes so maybe making them is a good thing.
Hopefully, it won't happen again with this one.
By @Nancy OShea
barman, general tour for everyone... let's have a drink 😉
By @Phil5E57Question: Indeed I tried with this process while keeping the same header, menu and footer during navigation and therefore make modifiable that the "content" part but I realize that the entire pages are reloaded each time:
It is important to understand that the child pages are all independent pages and therefore they load independently each time one of them is invoked.
As @osgood_ says, you should not confuse them with SPAs, and of course if you are interested, I recommend the following two books by Manning.
- https://www.manning.com/books/spa-design-and-architecture
- https://www.manning.com/books/single-page-web-applications
however there is a lot of free material on the web if you prefer
Anyway, DWT will not be of any use to you, and you will have to become familiar with JavaScript (and in particular promise - https://techtalkbook.com/javascript-promises-and-how-it-works/)
my site should be around 80 pages - static site (mostly text) and update frequency approximately every quarter. (On the other hand, you tell me that for the more important sites, the .dwt models can be corrupted ...By @Phil5E57
It is true that during the development period, it can be annoying to frequently update all child pages, as soon as the model changes (you can also refuse to update from time to time, especially if it does not affect the model in depth... conditional or repetitive variable or block changes...).
However, it should be taken into account that once in place, this type of modification remains sporadic.
So only the modified child pages will be downloaded. 80 pages is a correct number for not being a massive management... and modification once in a while (90 days...) is not at all a painfull task...
I can't answer for @Nancy OShea , and it's not my approach, but I've been using DWT consistently for years (mind you, when it's adapted, justified and validated) and I don't encounter any particular problem.
if sometimes a child page gets corrupted... it's not a big deal... just open the assets palette, snag the Template and drag and drop it onto the visual rendering of the child page concerned. and hey presto, the affections are re-formed.
At the time, Joseph had published a wonderful book on the subject... https://www.amazon.com/Joseph-Lowerys-Beyond-Dreamweaver-Lowery/dp/0735712778 the problem is that the shipping costs can be more expensive than the book itself
By @B i r n o u
I'm afraid I totally disagree with this statement, 80 pages IS a considerable amount of pages to manage, in my opinion. I'm in full agreement 100% with Nancy on this issue, there are better water-tight methods than using Dreamweaver templates. I personally would not want to risk that such an extensive amount of pages actually have been updated by using a draconian method, which really if anytthing, lends itself to simple websites with few pages. The only sure way to to check is to open each and every single page, which of course no-one is going to do so potential for errors to creep in un-noticed are constantly present. When using a more robust approach this can't happen, you can be totally confident that the update process has been executed accurately. You'll always be in good shape to scale the project as well if needs be.
I inherited a holiday/touring website some years back to manage, which had been built with DW templates. I suspect it started off small with a few pages and grew to about 150+ static pages - absolute nightmare to manage as handfuls of files attached to DW templates became corrupt on each update, which then had to be detached from the template and manually updated and I could never get the template re-attached again so had to write down the names of the files which became corrupt so I could keep track of which were un-attached to the template. Of course it all became a hive of a mess over a coupl/e of years of updates until eventually I was able to rebuild it using a more robust workflow...........bliss.
'Beyond Dreamweaver' - Joseph Lowery 1st edition publish in 2002 - thats like 19 years ago!! I think things have move on - back with the dinosuars comes to mind.
I mean if you want a book specifically on DW Templates try Murray Summers (contributor in this forum for many years before he retired) and Brad Halstead, also written in 2002 BUT I wouldnt recomend it NOW.
'Beyond Dreamweaver' - Joseph Lowery 1st edition publish in 2002 - thats like 19 years ago!! I think things have move on - back with the dinosuars comes to mind.
By @osgood_
Nope, things never moved concerning DWT, since that time... and I know that 20 years in computer science represents a whole era.
but, looking closely at this point... on the DWT side, it has had no reason to really move... if to make many improvements in their own usability within their own implementation inwithin DW.
But not on the functioning of the HTML pages themselves that once passed through the DW mecanism will work without any third party technology that would be obsolete.
An that is in itself an extremely important point to take into account
- DWT produces simple HTML
- DWT is an internal DW mill that produces HTML only
- DWT is not a technology that requires special support, no server, no plugin, nothing but just HTML
so the question is whether this DW-specific mechanism for producing simple HTML is still acceptable, practical and efficient in this or that situation... that's all.
Anyway, I'm not trying to convince anyone... I'm supporting Ben's point of view in this thread, I'm giving my testimony as a DWT user, but I'm not forcing anyone to do it.
concerning Murray, I never found a book about Template, I just hear (at te time it was written) about Jospeh... Joseph was a real developper... at the time of xHTML (before AJAX) he was a genius on Javascript routine... but I will be really glad to learn from the Murray's one, if you have any link ?
Nope, things never moved concerning DWT, since that time... and I know that 20 years in computer science represents a whole era.
By @B i r n o u
That's my point, its 19 years since anything was upgraded. Since then we have a lot, some would say, of amazing workflows appearing, which are better. We wouldn't use inline styling now or tables for layout, I hope. php/javascript back then wasn't that well supported amongst the 'casual' developer so we used workflows like DWT templates/library items as it was easily available and within our scope, but not optimal or hugely flexible. Then along came packages such as MAMP, XAMPP and the like, which made installing a server super simple instead of prior to that you had to manually install php and sql. JQuery for those that didnt have a good knowledege of javascipt made life easier to use javascript as an option - at that point those of us that wanted to progress started to look beyond the 'static' and fairly limited options which were available inside Dreamweaver to create 'dynamic' websites.
An that is in itself an extremely important point to take into account
- DWT produces simple HTML
- DWT is an internal DW mill that produces HTML only
- DWT is not a technology that requires special support, no server, no plugin, nothing but just HTML
so the question is whether this DW-specific mechanism for producing simple HTML is still acceptable, practical and efficient in this or that situation... that's all.
By @B i r n o u
Those are all valid points and what I think you were trying to express in the other thread regarding your hospital app on a stick. In that case then obviously php or server-side javascript would NOT be an option to use, but vanilla javascript, which runs natively in the browser would still, in my opinion, be a more stable and less intrusive workflow, assuming this hospital app of yours still needs to be run in a browser, I would assume so.
concerning Murray, I never found a book about Template, I just hear (at te time it was written) about Jospeh... Joseph was a real developper... at the time of xHTML (before AJAX) he was a genius on Javascript routine... but I will be really glad to learn from the Murray's one, if you have any link ?
By @B i r n o u
Eric Myers WAS the daddy of css back in the day but alas NOT any longer, Jospeh WAS considered at the time to be ahead of his time, but time has caught up. Everyone has their day, even the likes of you and me and then we are consumed by those who are 30 years younger and have other ideas, not always necessarily better, but the wheels roll around and things move along, rapidly.
Murray in his day was 'topman' in this forum, he had an immense amount of experience, shared that on a daily basis here and the forum which preceeded this one. I learned pretty much everything from him at the time. You can't sustain that though as you get older and eventually I think he began to fade away, started to use Wordpress as the pressure to produce at the cheapest possible prices took hold. After a couple of years he retired.
If you Google Murray Summers/Brad Halstead the DWT template book will appear on Amazon but at 34 quid its a waste of money, in my opinion. In its day 19 years ago it may well have had some credibility.
An that is in itself an extremely important point to take into account
- DWT produces simple HTML
- DWT is an internal DW mill that produces HTML only
- DWT is not a technology that requires special support, no server, no plugin, nothing but just HTML
so the question is whether this DW-specific mechanism for producing simple HTML is still acceptable, practical and efficient in this or that situation... that's all.
By @B i r n o u
Those are all valid points and what I think you were trying to express in the other thread regarding your hospital app on a stick. In that case then obviously php or server-side javascript would NOT be an option to use, but vanilla javascript, which runs natively in the browser would still, in my opinion, be a more stable and less intrusive workflow, assuming this hospital app of yours still needs to be run in a browser, I would assume so.
By @osgood_
if you carrefully read the very first thread, where I mentionned this real life example, I was also talking about Electronics Reader, only compatible with plain HTML and not with JavaScript.
The use of full page in HTML format, with no script (dynamic generation of content) nor PHP, was a
very hard constraint... but it was there a condition sine qua non, so that this base of contents of help to the decision, can be copied stuck between key USB and readable as such since any machine (especially in case of zone (or camp) of bush defined in an immediate way)
my biggest fear (I just checked now on my local copy) was the number of files 2,402 files spread over 776 folders, generated from 13 DWTs. No nested templates were employed... only tons of IFs, lots of nested VARIABLES, a few REPEATs.
The project was initialized in 2014 and 7 years later... it's still running 😉
well, honestly, I must admit that this example, although it shows that DWT works, and remains viable, even on a large scale, remains a very particular case.
if you carrefully read the very first thread, where I mentionned this real life example, I was also talking about Electronics Reader, only compatible with plain HTML and not with JavaScript.
The use of full page in HTML format, with no script (dynamic generation of content) nor PHP, was a
very hard constraint... but it was there a condition sine qua non, so that this base of contents of help to the decision, can be copied stuck between key USB and readable as such since any machine (especially in case of zone (or camp) of bush defined in an immediate way)
my biggest fear (I just checked now on my local copy) was the number of files 2,402 files spread over 776 folders, generated from 13 DWTs. No nested templates were employed... only tons of IFs, lots of nested VARIABLES, a few REPEATs.
The project was initialized in 2014 and 7 years later... it's still running 😉
well, honestly, I must admit that this example, although it shows that DWT works, and remains viable, even on a large scale, remains a very particular case.
By @B i r n o u
Sounds like you had a rare, unique requirement going on there that would have perhaps been more suited to a native application. Anyway you solved it using DWT templates but I still dont think it merits the recommendation of using them, wide spread, where the requirements are not contrained by those that you faced.
The OP may well have been constrained through 'fear' of deploying javascript or php, that's no real excuse, considering a server, either javascript or php is very easy to install these days and will save a lot of headaches further down the line.
2,402 file spread over 776 folders and 13 DWTs - sounds like one of those old WWII bombs which are still laying around, just waiting to be triggered.
on the other hand if you have only 80 pages... if you use clean code... if you have no frequent updates... if you don't want to use PHP... nor Javascript... go for DWT ;)... at least you can give it a try
By @B i r n o u
Well no I personally would'nt thanks, having been there. As I pointed out in response to Bens post. Its too much of a pain if you update a generic region, upload the 80+ pages only for the client to turn around and ask for several changes, then asks for more when they are complete. If I use javascript, includes or php I only change 1 file and upload that - I'll leave the DWT templates to you and anyone else that want unnecessary overhead and doubts.
Not least to say you can also make decisions with javascript/php if necessary, so its flexible. I could deliver different content to different pages all served by the same include file.
Not least to say you can also make decisions with javascript/php if necessary, so its flexible. I could deliver different content to different pages all served by the same include file.
By @osgood_
of course, but this is out of the pseudo specifications that ask (read the original request of the poster)... to use the same header, footer and so on... without using PHP or Javascript... so using only Dreamweaver...
I'm going to end up believing that the neurons have a RAM that is losing speed 😜
of course, but this is out of the pseudo specifications that ask (read the original request of the poster)... to use the same header, footer and so on... without using PHP or Javascript... so using only Dreamweaver...
I'm going to end up believing that the neurons have a RAM that is losing speed 😜
By @B i r n o u
My brain thinks way ahead. I see things that may well be required in the future and by that time its too late if you choose the wrong path, which has limitations. That's why I mention flexibility, scalability. I'd rather be in a good position than one of always playing catch up.
We dont know why the OP doesnt want to use php or javascript. If its for no other reason than they are 'fightened' of the prospect, when its really a simple process then I think its correct to try and encourage them to re-consider rather than jumping head long into a dead-end workflow. It's not like they need to write much php or javascript, just 1 line.
Eric Myers ... [[ SNIPPED ]], Joseph Lowery ... [[ SNIPPED ]], Murray Summers ... [[ SNIPPED ]], ....
By @osgood_
Youps, I'm sorry @osgood_ 100% excuse... my intention was not to compare one with the other... I was just quoting Joseph and his book, as there is a chapter (as well as several parts of the book) dedicated to the advanced use of DWT.
Of course, it's old, but it doesn't matter, the internal mechanics of DW still work, to generate the HTML that is deposited, and used, inline... so if you write clean code (HTML...) the result will be necessarily clean... 🙂
If you Google Murray Summers/Brad Halstead the DWT template book will appear on Amazon but at 34 quid its a waste of money, in my opinion. In its day 19 years ago it may well have had some credibility.
By @osgood_
yes please, I did, but Amazon get back no result... so if you have a link, I will be really interested...
I like Murray, I often had talks with him, we even disagreed on some points :)... so always constructive exchanges... and for my own culture, I like to read about DWT, we always learn everyday...., and look... considering the previous exchange... I still have some projects running under DWT 😉
Youps, I'm sorry @osgood_ 100% excuse... my intention was not to compare one with the other...
😉
By @B i r n o u
I wasn't comparing them. I was pointing out they are icons of a byegone age in web-development and are largely irrelevant these days.
🙂
I like Murray, I often had talks with him, we even disagreed on some points :)... so always constructive exchanges... and for my own culture, I like to read about DWT, we always learn everyday...., and look... considering the previous exchange... I still have some projects running under DWT 😉
By @B i r n o u
Various of prices:
AMAZON:
https://www.amazon.com/Dreamweaver-MX-Templates-Brad-Halstead/dp/0735713197
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Dreamweaver-MX-Templates-Brad-Halstead/dp/0735713197
EBAY:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Dreamweaver-MX-Templates-by-Murray-Summers-Brad-Halstead-/373420648448
AdChoices