Dreamweaver Course

Adding Forms

Forms and the various elements within a form allow users to enter information into a web page. The information may be employed only within the web browser to perform some calculation for the visitor (such as a calculator) or may be submitted back to the server for greater interaction with the user such as product orders, user registration and web site searching. Although a scripting language is necessary to process the data, the actual form elements themselves are HTML and are easily added with Dreamweaver. After completing this section, you should be able to:

• Understand the use of forms on the web
• Create a basic form with text fields
• Add check boxes and radio buttons to a form
• Include a dropdown menu
• Provide buttons for submission and reset

Adding Behaviors

"Behaviors" is Macromedia's term for JavaScript functions associated with elements of a web page. For example, the following link has a behavior associated with it : when the user clicks on it, a pop-up box is launched. We will discuss the types of events that can trigger behaviors to take effect - for example, when the mouse moves over an item, when a link is clicked, or when a page is loaded. You will learn how to associate Dreamweaver's pre-written JavaScript functions with these events to accomplish advanced image rollovers and writing to text layers. In this part of the course you will learn how to:

• Launch a new browser window of a designated size
• Alert the user with a pop-up message
• Validate a form's data before it is submitted

Templates and Library Items

Larger sites often involve both content entry and web design: webmasters produce a template of a page, and then other members of the organization populate instances of that page with data. This entails the risk that the content/data entry staff will accidentally change the layout of the page. To guard against this, Dreamweaver offers a tool called "templates", web pages where only certain designated portions are allowed to be edited. Even on small websites, it is often necessary to include identical snippets of code in several web pages. For example, all the pages in a site might contain the same main navigation code. Without resorting to templates, Dreamweaver allows the web author to create "libraries" of code snippets and to include them into one or more pages. When the code changes, Dreamweaver will replicate the changes to all the individual pages. This makes it extremely easy to manage and add headers, footers and navigation bars. After completing this section, you should be able to:

• Create a site template and use it for creating pages
• Modify the template and update pages
• Add a repeating region to a template
• Define an optional region in a template
• Modify the properties of the template
• Understand the difference between templates and library items
• Create a new library item and add it to a page
• Modify a library item

Spry and Ajax

An exciting new technique in web development has emerged in the last few years commonly called Ajax. Ajax is not a language but rather the use of several different languages including XHTML, XML, CSS and JavaScript to update page content dynamically without having to reload the web page. Dreamweaver's suite of Spry tools writes Ajax code for us. After completing this section, you should be able to:

• Understand the various components of Ajax
• Get data from XML
• Create a table with Spry
• Use Spry to update content based upon user selection
• Use Spry to create dynamic form fields

Prerequisites:

• Basic PC and Windows skills: copying/pasting, right-clicking, finding files, switching between programs, exploring windows
• Dreamweaver Fundamentals, or equivalent experience

keywords: Dreamweaver training san francisco bay area (Dreamweaver Fundamentals) Dreamweaver training san francisco bay area (Dreamweaver Advanced)