Archive for the ‘Dreamweaver’ Category

WordPress install instructions

Saturday, March 28th, 2009

Disclaimer: As most readers of this blog know I am an IT teacher so for my diploma students here is an update version of wordpress’s famous 5- minute install readme.html file.

Even though most of you don’t read the readme or all install instructions!! -Smart people know to read the readme properly first. But having said that many readme’s have a real expection of assumed knowledge so this is based on my what I know about my students assumed knowledge :)

The install instructions on wordpress are great but below is a short version of that and a better version of the readme that comes with the down load of wordpress 2.7

Updated WordPress: Famous 5-minute install

  1. Down load the latest version of WordPress from www.wordpress.org
  2. Unzip the package into an empty directory. (for my student this will be our local Dreamweaver folder so this about how you are going to work with it!!)
  3. Login into your control panel and create a new database and user for this wordpress installation (if you don’t understand this step check with your hosting provider about creating a mysql database and user with full privileges)
  4. Once you have these details
    -Open up
    wp-config-sample.php on your local machine with a text editor like notepad or similar and fill in your database connection details. (my student know I will have define a site within Dreamweaver and will open wp-config-sample.php within Dreamweaver because I am about to customise wordpress to the max but any text editor will be fine)
  5. Save the file you have edited as wp-config.php
  6. Upload everything!!!!! – this begs the question to where??- do you want your domain to be the blog or do you want this blog to be a subsection of your site- think ABOUT WHAT YOU WANT- then either upload everything to the root of your domain if you want your whole site to be the blog or to a specific folder if you want your blog to be a subsection of your domain. (If that made no sense don’t hesitate to comment me – student or otherwise)
  7. Open http://yourdomainname/installfolder/wp-admin/install.php in your browser. This should setup the tables needed for your blog. If there is an error, look at the error properly – most of the time it what you entered into wp-config.php file, and try again. Note the password given to you. And comment me with full details and I’ll have a look and let you know if it was your config or upload that is wrong
  8. The install script should then send you to the login page. If you get this far WOOHOO.
  9. Sign in with the username admin and the password generated during the installation. You can then click on ‘Profile’ to change the password.

The next post next week is how to test your wordpress install.

If this post was helpful please let me know- I love wordpress so will happily have a look and write a post about your install.

what I like about CS4

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

First the disclaimer- I have only had Adobe CS4 installed for a few weeks and haven’t really dug deep deep down yet but I have had a play and I have updated some commercial work so I think I’m at a point of to be able to comments on the the CS4 update.
In Dreamweaver I love the new workspaces- it was always a pain for me that I couldn’t undock the panels and move them to the my second monitor so I have more design view room. So now that I have the option of dual screens
I love the having the code inspector open all the time big so as I edit in design view I can see properly whats happening in the code. No more split screen and having to scroll up and down continuously.
I also love that I can now open and tweak the original Photoshop documents that my images are based on directly from within Dreamweaver when previously this was only possible for Fireworks based images.
One thing that still hasn’t improved is Dreamweaver FTP client – while it may mean that I have accessed to feature such as collaborative features such as checking in and out it really is still painfully slowwwww!!!
Another feature which I like is the updated data set wizard which is a lot easier or at least seems alot easier now to add some ajax interactively. The movie below is a great intro and very easy to follow.

This is a great movie from Adobe on Web Widgets
PS: Welcome back :)

Same navigation code on every page –different look

Monday, September 8th, 2008

Most websites highlight the navigation item of the user’s location in the website, to help users orientate themselves. This is a fundamental requirement for basic usability, but can be a pain as you’ll need to tweak the HTML code behind the navigation for each and every page. So is it possible to have the navigation highlighted on every page, without having to tweak the HTML code on each and every page? Of course it is but the answers below require a lot more tweaking than is below if you are using Dreamweaver templates- but that’s for a post next week :)

But what you need to do is assign a class to each navigation item:

<ul>
<li><a href=”#” class=”home”>Home</a></li>
<li><a href=”#” class=”about”>About us</a></li>
<li><a href=”#” class=”contact”>Contact us</a></li>
</ul>

You’ll then need to insert an id into the <body> tag. The id should be representative of where users are in the site and should change when users move to a different site section. When in ‘Home’ it should read <body id=”home”>, in ‘About Us’ it should be <body id=”about”> and in ‘Contact Us’ <body id=”contact”> etc.

Next, you create a new CSS rule:

#home .home, #about .about, #contact .contact
{
css rules go here
}

This creates rules that only takes effect when class=”home” is contained within id=”home”, and when class=”about” is in id=”about” and class=”contact” is in id=”contact”. These situations will only occur when the user is on the appropriate page, seamlessly creating our highlighted navigation item. Pretty cool!

More of this type of thing can be found here.

http://www.webcredible.co.uk/user-friendly-resources/css/more-css-tricks.shtml