Dreamweaver templates and libraries can help you create Web pages with a consistent design. Using templates and libraries also makes it easy to maintain your Web site, since you can redesign your site and change hundreds of pages in seconds.
A template is a document that you can use as the foundation for other documents. When you create a template, you can indicate which elements of a page should remain constant (noneditable) and which elements can be changed. For example, if you are publishing an online magazine, the masthead probably won't change, but the title and content of the feature story will change in every issue. To indicate the style and location of the feature story, you can use placeholder text and define it as an editable region. To add a new feature article, the writer just selects the placeholder text and types the article over it.
You can modify a template even after you have used it to create documents. Then, when you update documents that use the template, the locked (noneditable) sections of those documents are updated to match the changes to the template.
Click the arrow button for an animated introduction to using templates in Dreamweaver.
Dreamweaver also provides two ways to deal with recurring content so that you don't have to change it on every page of the site: library items and server-side includes. You might use these approaches for content that appears on every page of the site (such as a header or footer) or for content that appears on only a few pages but must be updated frequently (such as news headlines or sales specials). These approaches are appropriate to different kinds of sites:
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Library items are safe to use on every site and should always be used for sites that will be viewed locally. See About library items. |
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Server-side includes can be used only for sites that are viewed from a server, and only on servers that are configured to process server-side includes. (Ask your webmaster or system administrator whether your Web server supports server-side includes.) See Using server-side includes. |
In templates and files based on templates, editable regions and locked regions are highlighted in different colors. Highlighting preferences let you customize the colors used in the Document window to identify template regions and library items. For more information, see the following topics:
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To customize template highlight colors, see Template preferences. |
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To specify the highlight color for library items, see Library preferences. |
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You can also specify a highlight color for content tagged with third-party tags. See How custom tags appear in the Document window. |