Brad Halstead joins DMXzone

We’re delighted to welcome Brad Halstead as a Premium Tutorial author today. Brad is considered by New Riders publishing to be their stellar technical editor on matters Dreamweaver, and has also co-written “Inside Dreamweaver MX”, “Dreamweaver MX Magic”, and “Dreamweaver MX Templates” (with Murray Summers, with whom he maintains the web site http://www.dreamweavermx-templates.com/)

Brad will be writing on Dreamweaver Templates every second Tuesday. The tutorial plan (which is subject to change after feedback) is:

Templates, Library Items & Includes?

As an introduction to the template series, this segment will give a detailed explanation of what templates are, what each template element is and how they can help the developer create wonderful Contribute friendly websites for their clients, similarly, there are times when a template controlled site just doesn’t make sense that that will be discussed also. This would cover all the terminology for templates, SSI’s and Library Items, as well as their limitations, uses and when not to use them using discussion and by example.

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What does CodeOutside do?

Templates have the ability to lock code above and below html or not, this is another difficult concept for people to wrap their heads around and can quite easily be explained and demonstrated. It’s actually an either or situation.. either you want the template locked and the dynamic stuff gets put on each page (But not editable on each page) or you want total customizability on each instance and nothing propagates from the template in this region.

         Locked: Template can have server-side code added above/below the html tags and it propagates to the child pages. This also means that the area in the child pages is NOT editable.

         Unlocked: Template can have server-side code added above/below the html tags and it will NOT propagate to existing pages BUT will be retained in new pages (Although not updateable). This also means that each child page can have additional server-side markup added without incident.

What does all this mean and how to use it to your advantage?

When to apply template to page and when NOT to apply template to pageThere are circumstances when applying a template to an existing non-templated page can wreak havoc with the page, other times it is darned smart to do it this way. This tutorial would explain the times when and when not to apply the template to an existing page and what methods are available if the not condition is the case. Can it be batched.. yes/no.

Template Expressions (2 tutorials – Binary & Unary/Other)

  - Discussion of what the differences are between Unary and Binary Operators

  - Discussion and example of what each of these do as well as other operators

Nested templates (WHY Bother?)  - There truly is no unique situation that a nested template would be required especially with the power of parameters, expressions, repeating regions, optional regions and MultipleIf conditional regions. However, when dealing with Contribute users, nested templates can be employed to offer a series of section unique pages that remain constant in the site structure. This is the ONLY case where nested templates could be employed efficiently.

Along with this comes the region lock expression in nested templates @@(“ “)@@, when to use, why to use and how to use. ONLY works in nested templates and not in the base (root) template nor any child pages (instance pages).

MultipleIf Conditional regions - Using as a parameter value error checking routine  - When to use, why to use, how to use. This would cover the aspect of using a multipleIf conditional region to act as an error checking method for template parameter values as entered by the user using Modify > Template Properties on the child page. If the value entered does not match a series of choices then a layer is displayed telling the user what the allowed values can be.