How this book is organized

My previous books have taken a linear approach, but I have structured this one to make it
easier for you to dip in and out, using the Table of Contents and Index to find subjects that
interest you and going straight to them. So, if you want to learn how to create tabbed panels
with Spry, you can go directly to Chapter 8. Although the example pages use a design that
was created in an earlier chapter, you don’t need to have worked through the other chapter
first. Nevertheless, there is a progressive logic to the order of the chapters.

Chapters 1 and 2 serve as an overview of the whole book, explaining what’s new and what
has changed in Dreamweaver CS3. Chapter 2 also explains in detail how to use Spry effects.
They are simple to apply and don’t require knowledge of CSS or PHP. If you’re new to
Dreamweaver, these chapters help you find your way around essential aspects of the
Dreamweaver interface.

Chapters 3 and 4 show you how to set up your work environment for PHP and Dreamweaver.
If you already have a local testing environment for PHP, you can skip most of the material in
these chapters. However, I urge you to follow the instructions at the end of Chapter 3 to
check your PHP configuration. The section in Chapter 4 about defining your testing server in
Dreamweaver is also essential reading. These two subjects are the most frequent causes of
problems. A few minutes checking that you have set up everything correctly will save a lot of
heartache later.

Chapters 5 and 6 cover in depth how Dreamweaver handles CSS. If you’re relatively new to
CSS, Chapter 5 shows you how not to use Dreamweaver to create style rules. For more
advanced readers, it provides a useful overview of the various CSS management tools,
including the ability to reorder the cascade and move rules to different style sheets without
ever leaving Design view. Chapter 6 uses one of the 32 built-in CSS layouts to create an elegant
site, and in the process, unravels the mysteries of the CSS Styles panel.

Chapters 7 and 8 return to Spry, exploring the Spry Menu Bar and the tabbed panels, accordion,
and collapsible panel user interface widgets. Because these widgets make extensive use
of CSS, you’ll find these chapters easier to follow if you’re up to speed on the previous two
chapters. Of course, if you’re already a CSS whiz kid, jump right in.

Chapter 9 sees the start of practical PHP coverage, showing you how to construct an online
form. The second half of the chapter completes the roundup of Spry widgets, showing you
how to use Spry to check user input before a form is submitted. This is client-side validation
like you’ve never seen before. If you want to concentrate on PHP, you can skip the second
half of the chapter and come back to it later.

As noted earlier, Chapter 10 is a crash course in PHP. I have put everything together in a
single chapter so that it serves as a useful quick reference later. If you’re new to PHP, just
skim the first paragraph or so of each section to get a feel for the language and come back
to it later to check on specific points.

Chapters 11 and 12 give you hands-on practice with PHP, building the script to process
the form created in Chapter 9. Newcomers to PHP should take these chapters slowly.
Although you don’t need to become a top-level programmer to use PHP in Dreamweaver, an
INTRODUCTION
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understanding of the fundamentals is vital unless you’re happy being limited to very basic
dynamic pages. If you’re in a hurry, you can use the finished mail-processing script from
Chapter 12. It should work with most online forms, but you won’t be able to customize it to
your own needs if you don’t understand how it works. Chapter 12 also looks at using
Dreamweaver templates in a PHP site.

Chapter 13 gets you ready to bring out Dreamweaver’s big guns by guiding you through the
installation of the MySQL database and a graphic interface called phpMyAdmin. This chapter
also covers database backup and transferring a database to another server.

Chapters 14 through 17 show you how to build database-driven web pages using PHP,
MySQL, and Dreamweaver’s PHP server behaviors. You’ll also learn the basics of SQL
(Structured Query Language), the language used to communicate with all major relational
databases. To get the most out of this section, you need to have a good understanding of the
material in the first half of Chapter 9. You’ll learn how to create your own content management
system, password protect sensitive parts of your site, and build search forms.

The final three chapters (18–20) introduce you to working with XML (Extensible Markup
Language), the platform-neutral way of presenting information in a structured manner. XML
is often used for news feeds, so Chapter 18 sets the ball rolling by showing you how to use
Dreamweaver’s XSL Transformation server behavior to draw news items from a remote site
and incorporate them in a web page.

Chapter 19 explains how to generate a Spry data set from XML and use it to create an online
photo gallery. The attraction of Spry is that it provides a seamless user experience by refreshing
only those parts of a page that change, without reloading the whole page. The disadvantage
is that, like most Ajax solutions, the underlying code leaves no content for search
engines to index, or for the browser to display if JavaScript is disabled. So, Chapter 20 shows
how to get the best of both worlds by creating the basic functionality with PHP and enhancing
it with Spry. The final chapter also shows you how to generate your own XML documents
from content stored in your database.