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Website Help.Dream Weaver.Too Buy or not to Buy |
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| message from Shasha21 on 20 Jul 2004 |
Hi
I have recently downloaded a trial of (DW) Dreamweaver MX and Fireworks, I am
on day 5 and am not sure if i should purchase them, I need to build a website
which has regular photos added each week i would need to keep old pictures up
as well as adding new pages i have tried the web gallery in DW and like this
but will i be able to add other web galleries and will they come up with other
names rather than overwrite thye old pages, i will also need to have a search
engine to let people search for images (do I need to buy something else) that
will let viewer find an image or images, I have only designed pages and then
uploaded them with FTP Pro I thought it would be best to use DW to upload via
FTP once i buy the version. I have rang DW and asked for help and they
suggested i got onto the DW Forums so you guys must be good.
Thanks
Sharon
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| ~Angela, TMM replied to Shasha21 on 20 Jul 2004 |
Hello Shasha,
If you need search functionality and the ability to easily maintain a large
site you're going to want to do things dynamically. What that means is,
you'll need a host capable of either ASP, ASP.Net, ColdFusion, or PHP. If
you're new to dynamic development (and by your post my guess would be that
you are), you're likely to find ColdFusion to be the easiest of the server
models.
Dreamweaver can help you build a dynamic website. Read the F1 Help about
Server behaviors. You'll have to have a site set up properly before the
Server behaviors panel, Bindings panel, Databases panel, Applications
category of the Insert bar, and any additional server-specific areas will
work.
You'll most likely want to implement what's known as SSI (Server-Side
Includes). Here's some reading to get you started.
http://www.dwfaq.com/go/15606
Having the ability to use a server model (like ASP, ColdFusion, PHP or
ASP.Net), will allow you to do things like:
1. Upload images from a webpage.
2. Add, Update, and Delete records from a database
3. Display records from a database
4. Search records in a database
5. Read the contents of a directory and create links to all the images found
in the directory.
6. Create dynamically driven photo galleries so that you can page through
them using <Previous | Next> or 1 | 2 | 3 type navigation which is created
for you.
7. Have a single page to maintain for the image gallery rather than a static
HTML page for every image. It is mypage1.htm, mypage2.htm, mypage3.htm,
mypage4.htm vs. mypage.cfm?ID=, mypage.cfm?ID=2, mypage.cfm?ID=3,
mypage.cfm?ID=4. Notice with mypage.cfm they're all the same page, but the
ID controls what's shown on the page. Maintaining a single file is easier
than maintaining hundreds!
I'm sure there are more things that I'm not thinking of too...
Doing a search will most likely require you to have a database unless you go
with a service like Atomz.com offers. If you are searching using a database,
Tom Muck's Dynamic Search extension is a huge time-saver.
http://www.tom-muck.com/extensions/help/dynamicsearchasp/ (There are
versions for CF and PHP too, but the link is to the ASP version.)
I say, stick with Dreamweaver. Pick up a good reference book like the
Dreamweaver MX 2004 Bible or Dreamweaver MX 2004 The Complete Reference. If
you're a visual learner, you may want to try Lynda.com's online movie
library. There's everything from Basic to Intermediate Dreamweaver and there
is even a series of movies on building dynamic applications using ASP.
Hope this info helps, and good luck to you!
~Angela
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