Chapter 1: An Introduction of Macromedia Dreamweaver

Customizing Dreamweaver

Preferences settings

The Preferences dialog box is accessed by selecting Edit > Preferences through the pull-down menus in Dreamweaver. You can access preferences from either within the Site Management window or the document window of any page you are editing.

The Preferences dialog box is divided in two sections: a list of categories on the left and all the options for each different category on the right.

Some preferences of note in the General category:

• Add Extensions when Saving: turn this on to automatically save your files with the ".htm" or ".html" extension added to the filename.
  Maximum Number of History Steps: you can increase or decrease the number of steps saved in your history palette (note: the higher the number of history steps, the more memory is required).
  
  
• Update Links: you can set Dreamweaver to alert you when you have made changes that will require links to be changed or updated.
  
  
• Color Scheme: change the look of Dreamweaver's windows and palettes
  
  
• Object Palette: change the look of the Object palette to display icons with or without text, or to display objects in a list.

Important preferences for setting up Code Format include:

Case for Tags and Attributes: Setting this to lowercase produces code in lowercase. Do this to prepare for the next wave in web development: XHTML
Line Breaks: Leave this set to LF (UNIX) to match the www.bu.edu and people.bu.edu servers.

Important preferences for setting up File Types / Editors include:

External Code Editor: Specify the program file for an external HTML editor to work on your code (for instance, HomeSite or BBEdit)
Reload Modified Files: If you switch out to an external HTML editor, these options allow you to save files when switching programs and to reload a modified file when you switch back to another program.
Adding Extensions: You can configure other programs to be the default editors for various file type used in your site. For instance, if you are working with Pony Express forms and want to edit your message templates, you can add a .template and .message and specify Notepad (or SimpleText or BBEdit for Mac) as the editor for those file types. For restricting access, you can add .htaccess and Notepad (or BBEdit for Mac) as the editor. Or you can edit an existing file extension on the list (for instance, you can set up Photoshop to be the default editor for .jpg files).

Various preferences of note in other categories:

• Preview in Browser allows you to add other web browsers to the preview menu in Dreamweaver
  
  
• The document weight download speed can be changed in the Status Bar preferences category. You can also add custom screen resolutions sizes here.
  
  
• In the Fonts / Encoding category, you can change the fonts Dreamweaver uses in the HTML editing window.
  
  
• You can add or remove icons from your Launcher menu in the Floating Palettes category of preferences.
  
  
• Under the Invisible Elements category, you can specify what invisible page elements are displayed as icons in the Dreamweaver editing window (these can include image maps, named anchors, comments, line breaks, and a number of others.

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