During a recent discussion about Ajax frameworks, a comment was made suggesting that while the Spry Framework was nicely integrated into Dreamweaver and offered a wide range of options, effects and widgets, it was simply too bloated to use in production. In my usual fashion, I of course defended Spry. As the discussion progressed, we were soon huddled around my laptop, inserting various widgets from both Spry and jQuery and comparing the individual Javascript files. I have to admit that I was taken aback when we began looking at the size difference between the Spry widgets and their jQuery counterparts.

Spry Accordion vs jQuery Accordion

For those who may be unaware, Dreamweaver CS4 offers not only the ability to use the built-in Spry Framework, but also to add widgets from other frameworks such as jQuery (more…)

If you are as (dis)organized as I am, you probably don’t have all the assets for your web project in one place prior to building the site. Don’t get me wrong, I try – I really do – but invariably I’ll be coding along and realize that that one image didn’t get copied into the site’s images folder. The question is, what do you do now? There are basically three choices – with the third one being the subject of this tip.

The first, and most obvious, choice is to leave Dreamweaver and head out into the nether regions of your computer to find the desired image, and then copy it into the images folder of your site. Not difficult by any means, it just involves juggling several windows, and then you still have to return to Dreamweaver and insert the image into your page or CSS.

The second option is to either drag an image object onto the page in Dreamweaver (or use the Browse button if you are typing the img tag in Code View). Dreamweaver opens a dialog to allow you to navigate to the image. However, since the image is not located in your site folder, Dreamweaver will complain about this when you click the Choose button, asking you if you would like to copy the file to the your site folder. If  you say “yes”, Dreamweaver opens yet another dialog for you to name the image and select the folder you want to copy the image into. Again, not difficult, just more dialogs than I want to deal with.

Which brings us to the third option, the forgotten feature. (more…)

Continuing down the road of forgotten or overlooked features in Dreamweaver, have you ever gone to save a file, and due to the fact that you’d been navigating around your harddrive in a previous dialog, Dreamweaver suddenly seems to have “forgotten” where your site is? It happens to me all the time – in fact, it just happened again, so I thought I’d share one of those little nuggets that make you say, “OMG! I can’t believe I never noticed that before!”. It’s called the Site Root button. And the worst (ok, actually it’s the best) thing about it is that it’s been right under your nose in the Save dialog. (more…)