I've had a number of questions about web images and Dreamweaver recently so I thought I would share this video from my Dominate Dreamweaver Course.

Inserting Photoshop Smart Objects into web pages with Dreamweaver and using the Image Preview dialog to explore the JPEG, GIF and PNG image formats and the related options. Duration 17:12

(And yes I have trouble deciding whether to pronounce GIF with a hard or soft G!)

In spite of a few reports of serious bugs in Dreamweaver CS5.5, it has, for the most part, proven to be a solid and stable release. But that doesn't mean you should take the upgrade process lightly.

For instance, I recently came across a report of site definitions being lost when some Mac Users upgraded Dreamweaver to version CS5 (see http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/890/cpsid_89053.html). While I haven't heard of the issue occurring with the CS5.5 update or on Windows systems, it still serves as a reminder of a simple step that you can take to protect your site definitions before you upgrade: back them up. Here's how it's done.

Back up all your site definitions

1. Select the Site>Manage Sites… menu option.
2. In the Manage Sites dialog select all of your sites. You can do this by Command/Control+clicking on each site name or by selecting the first site in the list and Shift+clicking on the last site in the list.
3. With all the sites selected, click the Export… button.
4. In the Export Site dialog you will be prompted to save the site definition file (a .ste file) for your first site. The settings you choose will be used for saving all your site definitions. Each site definition will be saved individually, so I recommend saving the definitions into a folder you create specifically for them.
5. Navigate to the folder where you want to save your definitions and click Save.
6. You will be prompted to choose on of the following options:
1. Back up my settings…
2. Share settings with other users…
7. Since, the first option saves all of your site information, this is the option you want in order to be able to restore your site definitions later. Select it and click OK.
8. Back in the Manage Sites dialog, click OK. The site definitions for all of your sites will be saved into the selected folder.

To restore  a site definition from the backup .ste file, Choose the Site>Manage Sites… menu option and in the Manage Sites dialog click the Import… button and locate and open the backup file for the site you wish to restore.

Once you've backed up all your existing sites, I recommend you back up new sites as you create them and existing sites if, and when, you edit the site definition. And be sure to keep a copy of your backups in a safe location.

Backing up only takes a few minutes but, when the unexpected happens, it can save you hours of frustration.

If you found this article useful you might also want to check out Recovering Lost Site Definitions (Mac) and Recovering Dreamweaver Site Definitions on Windows

How to open Adobe Help in your Browser

Like the Beatles, "I'm feelin' down…" And this tweet from John Olson pretty much sums it up.

I dont think I can be anymore clear on how much I hate the Adobe help system. Adobe Community Help app BLOWS! Give me html help back plz

June 16, 2011 6:50 pm via Twitter for MacReplyRetweetFavorite

@john__olson

John Olson

I’m a fan of Adobe’s Dreamweaver documentation and often recommend it to students. However, Adobe’s system for delivering that documentation through an AIR-based* Help application (or as Adobe likes to call it Adobe Community Help) is at best annoying and at worst almost unusable**. So I was glad to learn from Rick Stone that it was a simple task to turn off some of the most annoying Help “features” or to bypass Help entirely and simply view the documentation in your browser.

The solution is simple, but since I’m not use to thinking of the help system as an application separate from the program it supports, I overlooked it and I suspect a lot of other people will as well. Here’s what you need to know.

Adobe Help preferences

As a stand-alone application, Help has it’s own preferences that you can access from within Help by choosing the Preferences item under the Adobe Help menu. To start Help choose [Program Name] Help from the Help menu of any Adobe Creative Suite application. You can also open Help directly from the following locations (assuming you installed your programs in the default location):

• Windows: C:\Program Files (x86)\Adobe\Adobe Help\Adobe Help.exe
• Mac OS X: User Name/Applications/Adobe/Adobe Help.app

The Settings:

There are a number of Preference tabs and, if you are sincerely committed to using Adobe Community Help, you can explore them. The only one I’m interested is the General Settings tab.

I recommend that, under Accessibility Mode you select the Open Help in browser application option. The next time you choose the Help option within an Adobe program, the appropriate page from Adobe’s online documentation will launch in your browser.

It's really that simple and it improves the usability of Adobe's documentation immensely.

*AIR, as I understand it, stands for Rich Internet Applications only backwards. According to Adobe it enables “developers to use HTML, JavaScript, Adobe Flash® and Flex technologies, and ActionScript® to build web applications that run as standalone client applications without the constraints of a browser.”

**The most annoying “feature” of Help is that you are constantly being prompted to update AIR, update Adobe Community Help (which requires the program to restart), update the Local content or, as was the case when I last tried to use it, all three. You can control these settings to some degree using the Download, Updater and Local Content tabs in the preferences panels but the options are confusing and I’m not going to go into them here.

The other truly annoying “feature” is that closing the Help window quits the program and you are forced through another launch (and potential update) cycle the next time you want to use Help. Since most people have a browser open almost constantly, launching Help in the browser avoids this issue (and, in any case, a browser will load more quickly than Adobe’s Help application).

Let me know what you think

I’m interested in hearing your opinions of Adobe’s Community Help, pro or con, along with any tips you might have for navigating the Adobe Help maze. So please drop me a note using the comment form at the end of this post.

I recently received this question from Darlene Hart:

Is it possible to identify which pages have been generated by a specific Dreamweaver template without actually making a change to the template and choosing to update?  I want to document which files are associated with each of my templates and I would be thrilled to find a simple way of doing that.

There is indeed a simple way to accomplish that task using Dreamweaver's powerful Find and Replace function.

In the code of all template-based pages there is a line near the top that identifies the template used. It looks something like this:

<!-- InstanceBegin template="/Templates/default.dwt" codeOutsideHTMLIsLocked="false" -->

In the example above "default.dwt" is the template file name.

So you can use Dreamweaver's Find and Replace function to locate all the files using a given template by searching the source code for the template file name:

1. Select menu: Edit>Find and Replace…
2. In the Find and Replace dialog:
   1. Find in: select Entire Current Local Site
   2. Search: select Source Code
   3. Find: enter the file name of one of your templates
   4. Click the Find All button

A list of all pages using the template with the file name you searched for will be displayed in the Search Results panel.