What's Up at the Rescue Mission

Since my last blog about the Rescue Mission, a lot more has happened. We've built a new index page for them and have started work on the next batch of pages that need updating. But in this post I would like to focus on Dreamweaver Templates.

In Dreamweaver, developers can built templates, which are basically web pages that have no content. Then new pages can be built off of these templates and the content is filled in; nothing else on the new page (the code copied from the template) can be changed. This is a great tool for developers who want to let others build new pages that will play well with the current web site. Standard things such as navigation, theme, and scripts can be put directly into the template, so others need only worry about filling in the content.

But this is only the most basic use of templates.

When a template file is modified and saved, Dreamweaver offers to update all pages based on that template. Suddenly, managing a large web site becomes a lot easer; there is no need now for PHP or other server side languages to built pages, which slows down load time. Instead, the page is built from the start.

At the Rescue Mission, Jeremy and I have used templates to make all the pages work and look the same. We can put the CSS and JavaScript in the template, so the people at the Mission do not need to worry about it.

Templates can be built off of other templates, creating what is known as nested templates. This way, templates can be built from more general templates. If the outer template (the original template) is modified, the nested template and all pages based on it are updated. If the inner template is modified, only pages based on it are updated.

We used nested templates to easily build one-, two-, and three-column layouts for the Rescue Mission. The index page uses the three-column layout, while most other pages use the two-column layout. Each layout is based on a basic layout that defines theme and behavior (scripts). The inner templates only require a short bit of new code to make columns. Again, updating is easy; only one file should ever need to be modified.

By using Dreamweaver templates, we hope to allow the Rescue Mission to keep their web site looking professional and uniform after we are gone, and to build new pages without a lot of work. To this end, we also plan to set up a blog, which would of course make the page even easier to update with news and announcements.