Posts filed under 'AJAX/JavaScript'
I have just added to my site a tutorial on converting a Spry Menu Bar into a server-side include. I have also been busy adding a bunch of brief articles to the Dreamweaver Cookbook on the Adobe site.
I answer a lot of questions in the Dreamweaver forums, and realized that a lot of the solutions I was coming up with for people weren’t easy to find after a couple of days. So, rather than letting them disappear into cyberoblivion, I decided to add any of general interest to the cookbook when I had a few spare moments. The Dreamweaver Cookbook is intended for code samples, and doesn’t have the capability of including screenshots, so I’ll continue posting longer tutorials on my own site. But I hope you’ll find my contributions to the cookbook useful.
Here are direct links to some of the articles I have added to the Dreamweaver Cookbook:
The Dreamweaver Cookbook is open to anyone to either request recipes or contribute recipes of their own. It could turn into a very useful resource if people start using it regularly. Check it out!
January 23rd, 2010
For the past two versions, Dreamweaver has come bundled with Adobe Bridge, a program that’s designed to make it easy to sort through visual assets, such as photographs, PDFs, and Flash movies. The idea behind Bridge is that it gives you quick access to items that you might want to work with in different parts of the Adobe Creative Suite. It’s particularly useful for Flash developers who want to build part of their movie in Illustrator or Photoshop. However, most Dreamweaver users seem to remain blissfully ignorant of its existence; or if they do know about it, they leave Bridge firmly shut.
That’s a shame, because Bridge has some very useful features. I use it frequently for batch renumbering my photos and for selecting photos to use in websites. The thumbnail images can be resized, making light work of choosing the best photo to zap into Photoshop and optimize for a web page. The other great feature in Bridge is what is called the Adobe Output Module. Among other things, this creates Flash-based web galleries of your visual assets. It’s incredibly easy to use, and produces really nice results.
The only problem is that the HTML file generated by Bridge makes the Flash movie fill the entire browser window, making it impossible to incorporate the gallery into an existing website. Well, it’s not really impossible. All it needs is a little editing of the HTML and JavaScript. I have created a new tutorial with step-by-step instructions to show how to incorporate an Adobe Bridge web gallery into a website. I hope you find it useful.
September 24th, 2009
About a year ago, Adobe asked me if I would become a moderator for Dreamweaver Community Help. The idea was to encourage people to use the Dreamweaver online Help files more frequently on the assumption that people would be more willing to do so if power users answered their questions promptly. It’s certainly worked. The problem is that some Help pages have become overwhelmed with questions. One of them is Customizing a Spry Menu Bar Widget.
It’s obvious that people love the ability to create a menu bar in seconds, but they hate banging their head on their keyboard trying to figure out how to edit the CSS. In response, I’ve created a couple of tutorials that are now live on my site. The first one goes into considerable detail, explaining the basics of customizing the CSS of a Spry Menu Bar, with instructions for both horizontal and vertical menu bars. The other, shorter tutorial shows how to centre a horizontal menu bar. I hope you find them useful.
September 20th, 2009
My publisher, friends of ED, is feeling in a generous mood. Each Thursday until further notice, it’s offering a selected friends of ED eBook for just $10. The catch? You have to snag it within 24 hours. This week’s $10 offer is Web Development Solutions: Ajax, APIs, Libraries, and Hosted Services Made Easy by Mark ‘Norm’ Norman Francis and Christian Heilmann. The clock started ticking at 0800 UTC, so go grab it while you can. And don’t forget to check http://friendsofed.com/dotw/ each Thursday to see the Deal of the Week.
March 5th, 2009
Adobe has officially announced the forthcoming release of Creative Suite 4, including Dreamweaver CS4, which I consider to be the most significant upgrade to Dreamweaver since 2002. Over the past few months, I have been beavering away rewriting The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP to bring it up to date with all the new features in CS4. Every chapter has been rewritten, and there’s a lot of new material, including coverage of time-saving features, such as Related Files, Live view, and the Code Navigator. The coverage of Ajax has also been strengthened, with a new chapter that helps you get under the hood of Spry, Adobe’s implementation of Ajax, as well as working with other JavaScript frameworks, such as jQuery and the Yahoo! User Interface (YUI) Library. The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP is due to be published on 1 December. More details here…
September 23rd, 2008
I’ve had a lot of positive reaction to my tutorial about linking to specific panels of Spry tabbed panels and accordions, but several people have found it difficult to adapt the code to work with a collapsible panel. In response to their requests, I have updated the tutorial to show how to link to a collapsible panel that’s normally closed so that it opens automatically when the page loads. The technique is very similar, and involves just a few lines of JavaScript. You can find the updated tutorial in the tutorials section of my website.
September 18th, 2008
For the past couple of weeks, online stores in the United States have been out of stock of The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP. I’ve been in touch with my publisher to find out what the problem is. Apparently, the book has proved far more popular than expected. The book is being printed for the fifth time in less than a year, and supplies should soon be back to normal. It’s also available as an eBook by going to the book’s page on the friends of ED site and clicking the “buy as eBook” link.
June 2nd, 2008
Many people were underwhelmed—wrongly in my opinion—by the last two releases of Dreamweaver. Well, Adobe has been working for the past year on the next version (Dreamweaver CS4), and it’s taken the bold decision to release it as a public beta. Be prepared to be stunned. It’s got a new interface to give an overall feel of unity with the rest of Creative Suite, but the changes are much more than skin deep.
I have prepared a couple of video tutorials to give you a whirlwind tour of some of the main new features, which are now live on my website. In the meantime, get on over to Adobe Labs to grab your own version of the Dreamweaver CS4 public beta.
You need a serial number to use the beta beyond two days. To get a serial number, you need to have a valid serial number for Dreamweaver CS3 or any of the CS3 Creative Suites. There’s also a forum to discuss things you like and don’t like about the new version. Don’t forget that it is a beta, so not everything is working perfectly yet. Developer Toolbox users also need to be aware that the current version of ADDT is not compatible with the public beta.
If like me, you’re heavily into server-side technology, you might be disappointed that there are no significant changes to the server behaviors. But believe me, there are so many brilliant new features (the full list is on the Adobe Labs site), this is the most significant upgrade to Dreamweaver since the release of Dreamweaver MX six years ago.
Grab it, and enjoy!
May 27th, 2008
All this week, Adobe is running Adobe Developer Week, a series of seminars on web development. On Friday 28 March, it’s my turn to give a talk called “The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP”. If that sounds an incredibly ambitious subject for a one-hour talk, it is, but what the heck. Actually, Adobe simply decided to use the title of my book; but there’s no way I can cram the content of all 750 pages into my talk, so what I plan to do is give a little flavour of each aspect: CSS, Adobe’s version of Ajax (Spry), and PHP. I’ll be demonstrating live with Dreamweaver, showing tips and best practice techniques.
So, why not join me online at 1600 UTC (0900 PST) on Friday? To participate, you need to register on the Adobe website. Up to 2,500 can join the live presentation, and it will be available as a recording about a week later. One lucky person joining the live seminar will be chosen at random to receive a free copy of Dreamweaver CS3, Flash CS3, or Flex Builder 3. (Unfortunately, for legal reasons, the draw applies only to the US and Canada.)
March 26th, 2008
Several readers have asked me to explain how to create a link to a specific panel in a Spry tabbed panels widget or accordion. The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3 shows how to do this from the same page, but not from another page. It’s quite simple to do with the help of SpryURLUtils.js, which was added to the Spry framework in version 1.6. I’ve added step-by-step instructions in the Tutorials section of my site, complete with a zip file containing a simple example. I hope you find it useful.
February 9th, 2008
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