Dreamweaver Templates
Macromedia Dreamweaver is the choice of many professional developers for building and maintaining web sites, and with good reason. Dreamweaver's architecture allows developers to extend and customize the application to meet their needs, and Dreamweaver's combination of visual layout tools and application development features, such as templates, enables developers to easily develop and manage web sites.
A Dreamweaver template is a powerful application development tool. A developer can create a page design, convert it to a template, and use the template to generate the pages for a site. The template consists of non-editable regions that are common to all pages generated from the template (i.e., areas such as the page header, a navbar, and a footer), and editable regions (i.e., the unique content of each page). When a template is updated, all the non-editable regions of the pages that were generated from the template are updated automatically. For example, if you edit a template to update the copyright date in the footer, the copyright date is automatically updated in every page that was generated from the template. Another advantage of Dreamweaver templates is the automatic updating of links. If you have a site structure with subdirectories, links (i.e.,links to images) are automatically updated when you generate a page from a template and save the page in a subdirectory.
While templates can be a useful tool for site development and maintenance, they can be a mixed blessing when it comes to large sites. For example, if you have 125 pages that were generated from a template and you update the copyright date in the template, all 125 pages are updated and must be uploaded to the server.
Fortunately, you don't have to forgo the advantages of templates when developing large sites. Just place common page information that is likely to change, such as a copyright date, in external files, just as you do with JavaScripts and style sheets, and include the information in the site's pages at run time using PHP or SSI. For more information, see "PHP Include Function".