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An Introduction to Dreamweaver MX Nested Templates

Donald Booth is co-author of "Inside Dreamweaver MX" (New Riders) and works for Macromedia Technical Support as a team lead for Dreamweaver.

If you've used Dreamweaver templates in versions 4 and earlier, are using Dreamweaver MX, and are ready to take it to the next level, read on!

First, we'll take a look at the type of web development situation in which nested templates would be useful; then we'll build a very simple example.

Bob's Fine Carpets: A Quick Example

Let's say you are building a site for Bob's Fine Carpets, Inc. Bob has four main product lines: Persian, Indian, Tibetan, and Antique. He wants a simple brochure web site with a main page and a page for each of his product lines. These pages should share a header which will be identical on each page. This is a classic situation in which to use Dreamweaver templates, of course, and the template could be designed as in the sketch in Figure 1.

FIGURE 1 : The 1st-level template

Remember the basic rule of templates: The template controls the non-editable regions, and the instances control the individual editable regions.

But Bob's line of Antique carpets needs special treatment. There are a number of subcategories of Antique carpets, such as 19th Century, European classic, and Early American, and Bob wants each of those subcategories to have its own page. And he wants each page in the Antiques section to share some identical content in the area below the header.

Bob needs to be able to update the common Antiques content frequently, so that all Antiques pages are updated. He'll also need to update the site-wide header, so that the header on all pages, including the Antiques pages, are updated.

A Job for Dreamweaver MX Nested Templates

This is definitely a job for Dreamweaver MX nested templates. Figure 1 above shows the editable and non-editable regions in the site-wide template. To accommodate the Antiques subcategory of site pages, you could create a second, nested template, laid out something like Figure 2.

FIGURE 2: The 2nd-level template

The important thing to understand here is that you would not simply be creating two separate templates.

A nested template is created from, and remains linked by template code to, the first template. A nested template functions much like an instance of its parent template, inheriting any changes made to the parent.

When Bob needs to change his photograph in the page header, this change would need to happen on all of the site pages, so he would make the change to the first template and allow it to propagate to all the instances, or child pages - including pages made both from the first template, and those made directly from the second template.

But when he needs to change the general definition of "Antique carpets" on only the Antique carpet pages, he would make that change to the second template, and it would propagate to only the pages made from the second template.

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