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.

Here's what has happened.

Jeremy and I have been volunteering at the Capital City Rescue Mission for the past couple months now. They have asked us to do a few things:

• Import their website to Macromedia Dreamweaver
• Fix their layout issues
• Set up a blog and show them how to use it

These may not seem like particularly difficult tasks, but updating the website is turning out to be a real ordeal. The company that built the site used very poor techniques. The worst is the tag soup, a mess of HTML with no layout or formatting and overlapping, unclosed, and depreciated tags. Also, there is no CSS, so the layout is built right into the content. The website is so bad that Dreamweaver is unable to open it.

In order to open the website in Dreamweaver, we have had to rebuild the website from the ground up using XHTML (a stricter subset of HTML) and CSS. This allows us to build a Dreamweaver template, so new pages can easily be added with little effort. Also, this separates the page's content from its presentation, so changes can be made without worrying if it will break borders.

The blog is not as big an issue; we have set up a simple Blogger blog, and we plan to make it match the website's theme. The problem here is that we would like to set the blog up on the Rescue Mission server, but we are not sure if the Mission allows external FTP. If it does not, the website will have to link to the blog on Blogger.

For our last couple visits, we have been slowly integrating the new, template-driven web pages into the old site, but none have been published to the public website yet. We hope to get something up on our next visit.

Works Cited

"Capital City Rescue Misison". <http://www.capitalcityrescuemission.com>