Design and Deploy web sites with Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 1002004 and Contribute 3 training from the source [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Altering the Start Page

To the first-time user, the Contribute Start page might appear to be little more than a nicely designed, standard Web page. Across the top stretches a header logo with a series of links on the right leading to tutorials and other assistance. More links on the left open the home pages for your connectionsagain, looking like traditional Web site home pages.

[View full size image]

But a great deal more is going on under the hood than is obvious. The links under the "Begin editing my websites" heading, for example, are dynamically inserted according to the connections available. Although this integration of external data and Web page is usually not possible outside of an application server environment, Macromedia engineers developed a novel approach that capitalizes on Dreamweaver's template technology, making this kind of functionality possible while keeping the page customizable.

If you've done any extensibility work with Dreamweaver, you're no doubt familiar with the Configuration folder. Contribute, too, has a Configuration folderfor the system as well as the individual user. The key to understanding how the Contribute Start page works is realizing that what the user sees when opening Contribute is a child page stored in the user Configuration folder, which is based on a template found in the system Configuration folder. All Start page customization work is applied to the template file, not the child page.

When customizing Contribute's help system, you'll find yourself frequently returning to Contribute's system Configuration folder; the easiest way to navigate within this folder is to create a Dreamweaver site pointing to its location.