Subtitles of the Movie

Library items are Dreamweaver components that you'll definitely want to use for almost all of your medium to larger sized web projects. Particularly if you need to keep your various sections or areas of a medium to large website consistent in look and appearance. Also, library items will improve your efficiency and workflow. Let me give you some tips and techniques in this movie for making your library work as efficient and as trouble free as possible. You want to use library items for footers and page headers. For example, in this Dreamweaver document this header area perhaps with a logo and nav system would be a good candidate for library. Footers make excellent candidates for libraries with copyright information, maybe a text based navigation system, update information and so on. However you'll want to avoid some common problems when using navigation systems as part of a library component, I'll cover that in a moment. Also, avoid using libraries based on navigation menus exported from Fireworks. If you know Fireworks at all there's an option for exporting as a Dreamweaver library item. And I've had a lot of trouble through various versions of Dreamweaver in getting these library elements that are essentially navigation systems built in Fireworks working reliably in Dreamweaver. Also, you'll want to use templates - which will be the topic of the next section of this tutorial - for larger sections of pages that have repeating components. Typically I'll restrict my library items to sections of a web page, maybe the top, right or bottom. If I have larger sections that really need to be used over and over and over again this is an ideal job for templates. Now you may very well run into some problems when working with your library items, especially the first few times you use them on a website. So let me go through some of the most common library problems that I see with my Dreamweaver students and clients, and some techniques for avoiding those problems. The biggest problem that I find are files that are not saved to the root folder. For example here in this library item make sure the library item itself, the library file is saved to the library folder in your root folder. Make sure that library folder has a capital L as well. Also, any content that's linked in that file must also be saved to your root folder. In this case I have an image and if we bring up the property inspector, notice that the image is actually saved to the root folder, that's what that dot dot forward slash means there. So it's very important that all content in those files, those library files are saved to your local root folder. And then lastly wherever you're saving or inserting this library element into, that file also must be saved to your local root folder. Now perhaps the most common problem that you'll get later when working with library elements maybe after you've applied library elements to half a dozen or more of your pages on your website, is you may find that a library item fails to update on a page when changes are made to that library item. In other words, the linkage has been broken. So some techniques to try; close down your Dreamweaver session and open up Dreamweaver again, maybe the linkage will come back. If not, I recommend deleting the library element from the page and then reinserting that element from the assets panel, the library view of the assets panel. And that usually works most of the time. And the last kind of problem that you'll run into are linking problems. These are very, very common. So let me point out some things that you may have forgotten while with library items. Now notice that I have some links here in this library file, and if we open up the property inspector you'll notice that although I'm linking to other pages that are in my site root, the link actually is not a direct link to that page, but it has a dot dot slash in front of it. Now the reason for that is remember this library file is saved in a folder, a subfolder called library with a capital L. In order to link to other files in the site root, I need to exit that library folder, and that's what that dot dot slash will do. It tell the browser exit out of any folder that you're currently in and then in the next level of the folder structure find a file called dw dot htm. Notice that all of my links are the same. In most cases you won't be storing files or content in your library folder, so you'll need that dot dot slash in front of all of your paths to correctly path out of the library folder and into the root folder. For more information about this exact topic revisit some of the movies in the links section of the tutorial, especially those about absolute versus relative links, how relative paths work, and document versus site root relative paths. As well as the movie entitled linking to files. That will conclude this section of the tutorial on library items. In this section you've learned how to create library items and insert them into Dreamweaver documents. You've learned how to update library items so that changes that you make to a library item are reflected in all of the Dreamweaver documents that contain that library item. You've also learned some valuable library management tips for avoiding problems and frustrations. Let me now move on to the next section of the course on templates. Library items are a great introduction to templates since templates are essentially library items on steroids. Whereas library items are usually restricted to one area or section of a page, templates cover the entire Dreamweaver document. So in the next section of the tutorial I include movies on how HTML templates work, how to create templates, types of template regions, how to set editable regions in templates, and much much more.