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Adding Rollovers and Navigation Bars in Dreamweaver

Letting the visitor know where they are and where they are going are the key ingredients for a good navigation system. Yet, with static HTML, this can be problematic. There is a limited amount of space on the computer screen, and Web designs have to walk the narrow line between providing enough information to let the visitor know what is going on and not overwhelming them with so much information that they can not find what they are looking for. Fortunately, JavaScript allows us to make quick changes to a Web page in reaction to the visitor's actions without having to reload the page.

 

A more advanced form of the rollover is the Navigation bar. This allows you to quickly assemble a collection of menu options with rollovers, which you can conveniently edit at any time.

Dreamweaver did not invent the rollover or the navigation bar, but both Dreamweaver MX and Dreamweaver MX 2004 allow you set them up quickly and easily without having to know all of the complexities of JavaScript.

 

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PHP/ CSS Image Gallery part 3

In last week's article, " Thumbnailing a Portion of an Image ", we took a look at how we could alter our image gallery to provide an interactive way of creating a thumbnail from our uploaded image. In this week's tutorial we will do two things: first we will alter our gallery admin page so that we can see at a glance whether an uploaded image has a thumbnail or not and provide a link from the admin page to create or recreate thumbnails, and then we will revisit the main gallery page again and alter it to display the thumbnails of the images with click-throughs to the larger images that the thumbnail represents.

It helps if you've read the previous article in this series, and hoping that you have read "PHP/ CSS Searchable Image Gallery" as well - but it's not compulsory, as all the code is provided.

 

Please note that this article forms part of a chapter in the DMXzone e-book PHP Web Applications for Dreamweaver: Juicy Solutions for the Busy Developer.

Note: Check also the DMXzone own CSS Image Gallery extension for amazing pure CSS galleries and slideshows with a fluent navigation and image transitions! 

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Working With Strings in .NET

During the course of this tutorial you will learn about the string class and many of the methods that it contains to make working with strings relatively easy, from converting the case of a string to finding out if it begins with, ends with or equals a specified value. Basic string formatting using the Format method and finding and extracting sub strings within a string are also covered. All the tasks typically associated with working with string data is covered such as copying, inserting, removing and replacing text in a string as well as how to clean white space from the ends of user input and working with string arrays.

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PHP Custom Web Statistics – Part 4: graphing the statistics

In the final part of this article on creating custom web statistics using PHP and MySQL, we're going improve on the display of our custom web statistics by adding some graphs, which give an easy to read display showing the best and worst months of the year, or days of the month for example.

 

In this tutorial, we'll first give a brief overview of the GD image library, and how to check whether it’s installed, as well as how to install the library if its not already part of your PHP installation. Then we'll look the PHP image functions that are necessary to perform the various drawing operations used to create the dynamic graphs. Finally, we'll adapt the month.php and year.php pages to display custom graphs of the relevant hit data.

 

Please note that this article forms part of a chapter in the DMXzone e-book PHP Web Applications for Dreamweaver: Juicy Solutions for the Busy Developer.

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Positioning footers with CSS

It's a common problem faced by nearly all of us as we transition from tables-based layouts to CSS. After the simplest layouts have been achieved, moving presentational font tags and other deprecated tags into CSS files,  a whole host of questions come to mind as to how to complete tasks that seemed simple using tables. Positioning a footer that 'sticks' to the bottom of the browser window is one such issue and in this article we will look at two ways in which we can achieve a footer for a CSS layout. We also investigate how to get over Internet Explorer's dislike of one aspect of our solution, and deliberately throw IE into "Quirks Mode" in order to acheive a cross-browser solution to the footer problem.

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One Business, Several Branches: Repetition for Unity

There are times when a client might own several subsidiaries or branches within a main company, and each branch may have its own “personality.” How do you design a site a site like this? What design elements do you change, and which elements should stay the same? In today's article, Linda deconstructs a site - Peter Gabriel's record company, Real World - to illustrate how the designers maintained unity throughout a site with a repetition of colour, layout, and images. The designers assigned each subdivision of this site a colour, and these colours are introduced on the homepage links.

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PHP/ CSS Image Gallery: Thumbnailing a Portion of an Image

In last week's article ("PHP/ CSS Searchable Image Gallery") we looked at how we could build an image gallery using PHP and MySQL and then display it with minimal effort by positioning the images on the page with CSS. Today we build an admin tool that allows you to define thumbnail images which we will link to the main image, but rather than blindly resize the thumbnail to within a set of specific size constraints, we will interactively provide you with a way of selecting a portion of the image to use as the thumbnail.

So, using this code you can interactively choose which area of a photo to use as a thumbnail, looking far more professional than presenting a tiny hard-to-see thumbnail of the whole picture. As an example, here are two seperate areas being selected as thumbnails, using the script provided and explained in this week's tutorial.

 

Please note that this article forms part of a chapter in the DMXzone e-book PHP Web Applications for Dreamweaver: Juicy Solutions for the Busy Developer.

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Two Dimensional Arrays and other Goodies

This week I’m going to give you a few tricks of the trade to use involving three things: Two dimensional arrays, using window.onload with an anonymous function and using the DOM to build a new SELECT form element. Sound obscure? I've used … er, I mean a friend of mine has used these techniques for loading advertising banners , and using a script to randomly select one of the array items in the first column, which is the banner, then grabs the associated link from the second column. Anything along those lines it would be great for.

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ASP: Role-based User Authentication

Today's article is a complete look at  how to configure the database to handle roles for our precious users, and then we'll explore a simple way to authenticate users on a task by task basis. The idea is to map users to the areas of functionality, or modules, they will use.

We make a simple but scalable role based authentication system by storing the data in a normalized way allowing us to easily rebuild the data in the user's session, and  create a quick but logical way to query this data. We implement the ever-important security check, and make sure that the user is forced to log out when his/her permissions change.

Although this tutorial is not beginner-level, all the code is provided if you just want the solution without understanding how we got there!

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PHP/ CSS Searchable Image Gallery

This tutorial teaches you how to build a dynamically generated Photo gallery. The database stores keywords against each photograph, and then user can search on those keywords and the resulting images are dusplayed, using PHP to query the database and CSS to present the page, and so avoiding tables and fixed numbers of columns.A basic admin system is also built up for you to put images into a database on your server.

This tutorial is suitable for intermediate-level Dreamweaver users, although no previous PHP knowledge is necessary.

 

Please note that this article forms part of a chapter in the DMXzone e-book PHP Web Applications for Dreamweaver: Juicy Solutions for the Busy Developer.

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Animating Draw Layers

In previous articles I showed you how to set up draw layers and how to add behaviours to a draw layer to create dynamic content. Dreamweaver MX (and the updated Dreamweaver MX 2004) also provides controls that allow you to animate draw layers through the use of a standard Timeline interface. Although not as sophisticated as the ones found in Flash or Director, the concepts are much the same. Dreamweaver will generate all of the DHTML code needed to animate one or more layers on the Web page.

 

This article is suitable for those using Dreamweaver MX and MX2004 with the newest update from Macromedia that restored the timeline to MX 2004.

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Using Space Effectively on a Web Page

There's nothing worse than a crowded, busy web site. Everyone needs some space in their design - but what's the best way to manage that space? Linda looks how fine artists in the past have organised their paintings and perspective, and shows how the rules still apply to making pleasing web design. With an extensive links section and bibliogrpahy, Linda shows how to present your excellent content in a way that will make your sites stand out from the crowd, looking professional and pleasing to your clients and your audience. Read More
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