Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, I review the use of the Insert Bar here at the top of the Dreamweaver CS3 workspace. The Insert Bar contains buttons for creating and inserting objects such as tables and images and form elements. The buttons are organized into categories. Up here in the common category, you have the most common things that you'll probably insert into your Dreamweaver documents, such as anchors, emails, links, images, DIV tags and tables, dates, comments, scripts, and so on. You've also got, in the layout category, all the items that are related to laying out pages. This is probably my second most used category in the Insert Bar. You have DIV tags, APDIVs, spry menu bars, spry tab panels, spry accordions, spry collapse panel. By the way, these spry elements are new, and they're also combined together up here in the spry category, but there are some that are related to layouts. The ones that I use the most are the Insert DIV Tag and the APDIV tags. That's essentially a layer, and the AP stands for Absolute Positioning. I've also got all the form components combined here together: Check boxes, radio buttons, radio groups, list menus, and so on. You've got your data components here in the data category; there's the spry category and the text category. You have a variety of formatting tools for formatting your text, such as making it bold, italic, strong, adding paragraphs. Notice you have your H1, H2, H3 headings here for adding different size of headings to your text, as well as list elements, unordered and ordered lists. Here you've got definition lists, definition terms, and definition descriptions, as well as abbreviations, acronyms, and characters here, such as non-breaking spaces and a line break. These two I use all the time. Line breaks are great if you don't want to have a two paragraph break between paragraphs, but just a one line break, left quote and right quote and M dash. Notice you have some symbols here, pound, euro, yen, copywrite I use often, trademark as well, registered trademark, and then you got a link to other characters that will bring up the Insert Other Character window here, and then the last category is one called Favorites, where you can assemble your own favorite list of objects, and the way you do that is you go back to one of the other categories and then you right click on that item, and then choose Customize Favorites, and that'll bring up the Customize Favorite Objects dialog, where you can organize your favorites category, as well as delete or remove and add new categories. So let's go in here and insert a button after my keywords, and let's add a field set, and let's go in here before button and insert a separator, like so. So you can see there's a, quite a, big collection of objects that you can add to your favorites category of the Insert Bar. Let's go ahead and add some form; let's add another separator and let's add some form elements, like so, and let's delete this field set by selecting it and pressing the trash can there. click OK. Now if I visit my Favorites tab here in the Insert bar, there is a collection of my most used objects. Let me conclude this movie then with a summary review of each of the categories. The common category let's you create and insert the most commonly used object, such as images and tables. Layout lets you insert tables, DIV tags, frames, and spry widgets. You can also choose two views for tables: standard, which is the default, and expanded tables. The forms category contains buttons for creating forms and inserting form elements, including spry validation widgets. The data category lets you insert spry data objects, as well as other dynamic elements, like record sets, repeated regions, and recorded insertion and update forms. The spry category, which is new, contains buttons for building spry pages, including spry data objects and widgets. I'll be covering this new feature a little bit later in the tutorial. The text category lets you insert a variety of text and list formatting tags, such as the bold, EMP, H1, and UL tags. And the favorites category lets you group and organize the Insert Bar buttons that you use most in your work with Dreamweaver CS3. Now there's another category that's available only for pages that use a particular server language, including ASP, ASP.net, CFML basic, CFML flow, CFML advanced, JSP and PHP. I don't have any of those elements or components on this page, so you don't see that extra category, but if I did, there'd be another category here called Server Code. Each of these categories provide server code objects that you can insert in code view. All these insert tabs up here, pretty straightforward. Perhaps less straightforward, but very important, is the Property Inspector. I believe this is one of the most important interface components of many of Adobe products, and Dreamweaver is no exception. So let me cover in more detail the ways that I think you should probably be using the Property Inspector, and I'll do this in the next movie.