Welcome to Part 8 of the Building a website with Web Premium CS4 tutorial series. In previous tutorials, you learned how to use Photoshop, Fireworks, and Dreamweaver to set up a website and build a web page prototype. In this tutorial, you complete the following tasks:

• Create a MySQL database and define its data structure.
• Connect to the database from within Dreamweaver.

Note: If you've just arrived at this section, you may want to go to Part 1 and start following along from the beginning. Or, if you prefer, you can download the sample files provided below and start following the instructions that are outlined here. However, the steps in this tutorial assume that you've installed the web server and application server as described in Part 2, and defined a Dreamweaver site pointing to the directory on your hard disk where the local site files will be stored.

Requirements

In order to make the most of this article, you'll need the following software and files:

Dreamweaver CS4

• Try
• Buy

Sample files:

• adventuretours_pt8_starter.zip (ZIP, 863K)
• adventuretours_pt8_solution.zip (ZIP, 869K)
• adventuretours_pt8_newfiles.zip (ZIP, 2K)

Note: If you've been working through the entire series, you only need to download and extract adventuretours_pt8_newfiles.zip, and then copy the database folder to your website folder. This folder contains a set of database scripts you'll use later in the tutorial.

Prerequisite knowledge

To get the most out of this tutorial, you should know how to:

• Install a software bundle on your local computer that includes the Apache web server and the PHP application server
• Create and define a website in Dreamweaver (the Local Info category)

Building a website with Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web Premium

For your reference, here are all the parts in this series:

Introduction
Part 1: Planning the website
Part 2: Creating a local site
Part 3: Creating a remote site
Part 4: Creating a visual design
Part 5: Slicing and exporting site assets with Fireworks
Part 6: Adding styles to finalize the page design
Part 7: Finalizing and reviewing the home page
Part 8: Creating a database
Part 9: Presenting dynamic data
Part 10: Adding Ajax functionality with Spry
Part 11: Creating an interactive web form
Part 12: Creating and presenting a Flash animation
Part 13: Adding video to the website
Part 14: Creating a blog with InContext Editing

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License

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