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 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.
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