Macromedia Studio 8 [Electronic resources] : Training from the Source نسخه متنی

Designating Editable Regions

In this final task, you'll specify editable regions on the template you just created for the Jade Valley Web site. An editable region refers to the areas on the template in which users can edit and modify content. All other areas in a document are locked, and users can't change them. Dreamweaver automatically locks the whole document when you first save a227 document as a template, you need to go back and make some regions editable.

You can create an editable region anywhere in the template document. For the template to be effective, you want to make the content areas editable, so that you can easily and quickly create all the pages for the site.

As you know, the anchor link was created to enhance accessibility, and you don't want anyone to edit it or accidentally delete it. As a result, you need to keep the named anchor as part of the locked region, so that anyone using the template can't accidentally remove it. But you don't want Main Heading to be the heading of every page! The main heading must be editable, while the image must not. Therefore, you'll have to move the image outside the <h1> tag.

[View full size image]

All the highlighted text is placeholder content. The whole point of creating a template is to replace placeholder text with real content, which isn't possible if it's locked.

[View full size image]

Always use a unique and descriptive name for the editable region. Because a template can have multiple editable regions, you can't use the same name for more than one editable region in a page template.

After you designate an editable region, Dreamweaver encloses the area in a highlighted box in the template. The tab at the upper-left corner of the region shows the name of that editable region. The tab is for identification only; it doesn't appear in browsers.

[View full size image]

The entire left column is reserved for special content. You want the entire section to be editable, so you can bring in unique content for different parts of the Jade Valley Web site. By selecting <td.content_left> from the Tag selector, you ensure that the entire cell is editable.

[View full size image]

Unfortunately, Dreamweaver provides no visual feedback that this entire layer is editable. However, you can verify that it is by switching to code view. Surrounding the <div id="special_content"> tag is a227 comment: <!-- TemplateBeginEditable name="content_special" -->, which is how Dreamweaver identifies editable template regions.

The template is ready to use. In the next lesson, you'll use it to create the entire Jade Vallley site.