Matt Stephens

Secure Login and Registration

You don’t have to be a secret agent to have information you don’t want to be available to the public. But what can you do if you want to put it online and share it with certain people — but not the entire English-speaking world? In this chapter we’re going to build a Login/Registration application using a mixture of code generated by Dreamweaver MX and some PHP which we’ll code by hand.

Case Study: Dynamic Image Viewer

What is important about your Dreamweaver site is not only that it’s easy to create, but that it’s easy to keep updated. The dynamic technologies that we’ve been looking at in the second half of this book enable you to do just this, and — in this last chapter — we’re going to take a look at a case study example.

Layout with Templates

People often forget that the web is fairly young. In fact, it was ‘invented’ in the early 1990s and only became popular several years later. Despite this, it’s moved swiftly in terms of what you can do with regards to page layout — to the extent that both web browsers and design tools have struggled to keep up with designers’ needs and ever-evolving web standards.

The Code Window

One thing that almost universally scares people when they start to work with the web is code. Whether it’s the barrage of acronyms you have to contend with — ASP, PHP, XML, HTML, JSP, CSS, and so on — or the fact that using code seems so alien to graphic design. However, without learning how to manipulate code directly, your web designs will often fail to be cutting edge, and will rarely be as optimized and streamlined as they could be. Code also enables you to do a whole bunch of cool things that are difficult — or even impossible — when using visual editing tools. In the long run, many of these can also save you time and effort, thus making a bit of initial pain very much worth your while.

Using PHP and Apache

In this chapter, we’ll take a look at how PHP works, and use our PHP/Apache installation to write a guest book that processes a form and e-mails both you and the user.

The Dreamweaver Interface

In the last chapter, we decided what we were expecting of our web site, and started thinking about how we wanted it to look. To continue to build the solid foundation for our project, we need to set up Dreamweaver so tat everything is in place for us to create our site seamlessly.

Creating Content for our Site

In the last chapter, we created a CSS file to make sure everything on our site is formatted in the same way. We also created some templates to work with. We’re now going to see our hard work pay off as we insert and lay out the content for our site.

Introducing Dynamic Content

In previous chapters, we’ve learned how to design and create pages using Dreamweaver MX. What we haven’t covered is what to do if you want to create a site that gathers and processes information from the user. Dreamweaver has the ability to deal with a whole range of dynamic elements to allow this to happen, and this is what we’re going to learn about in the rest of this book.

Introducing Dreamweaver MX

Dreamweaver is a tool for creating web pages, but then you already knew that. What’s less well known is how far this particular application has come; there’s a lot more to Dreamweaver than a few HTML shortcuts, and this book aims to take you to the depths of this versatile program.

PHP/MySQL: The Real Dynamic Duo

Before Dreamweaver MX, the PHP/MySQL combination was available in Dreamweaver Ultradev 4, but only if you installed a third party server model called Phakt. One of the most exciting things about the release of Dreamweaver MX is its native support for the dynamic duo, which makes creating interactive web sites easy PHPeasy.