If you're going to be working on a project that contains a lot of static repeatable content, you may want to consider setting up a template workflow inside of Dreamweaver CC.
Now, the big advantage of a template workflow inside of Dreamweaver CC is that if you ever change the template, any page based upon that template can be automatically updated.
It really simplifies the process of updating pages.
Now, templates, of course, would be used more for the data inside of the page and not so much for the visual presentation.
Of course, we have CSS to handle the visual presentation. but what if you have a lot of content that is similar in nature but of course different.
Well, again, this is where templates can be helpful.
Let me show you what I mean.
I'm going to scroll down in this page and you'll notice that there's an area called My Portfolio and there's different pieces of artwork here.
Let's just say for whatever reason you wanted this exact same page for the different types of artwork that you create.
Instead of having a generic My Portfolio, maybe you want a more specific photography portfolio, and then a more specific painting portfolio.
Well, you want this setup to be the same but what you want to do is create an easy way for you to come in and just modify the images and the text underneath it.
And this is where templates really can make this process a lot easier.
So, the first thing you have to do in order for you to work with templates is save a document as a template.
And that can be achieved by first turning off Live view if it's on.
Then you can come up to the File menu and from there, you can choose Save as Template...
What you want to do is choose the Site that you want to save this template in, and of course we're working on our Photography web site, so we want to save it there.
If you want to provide a Description, you can do that.
I'll go ahead and call this "Portfolio Pages".
And then, you need to save it.
And I'm going to go ahead and call it "mytemplate" for right now.
Of course, you can be as descriptive as need be when you save the document as well.
So, once you go ahead and click Save, it's going to automatically put this template in the Templates directory, so, you're going to get this dialog box asking you to update the links.
And we do want to do that, so, go ahead and click Yes.
Once you click Yes, you'll notice we're inside the template and you can see that it has a .dwt extension, which stands for Dreamweaver CC template, and what you want to do, of course, is create new pages based upon this template.
Right now, this is the template file.
We don't want to work on this.
What we want to do is create a new page based upon this template, and that can be achieved by going to the File menu.
From there you can choose New..., which will open up the New Document dialog box.
You want to come over to Site Templates, choose the site that you're working on, in this case, it's the Photography website.
Then you can go ahead and choose the template that you want to work with, which is mytemplate.
Notice your description appears here.
Now, the real power of this, of course, is to Update pages when the template changes.
So, you want to keep that option selected.
Then you can go ahead and click Create.
Once you click Create, if you want to make a change, if we scroll down here, we know that we want to change My Portfolio to something else, and we can also see that the stylesheet currently isn't being applied to this page.
We can verify that by clicking the Live view.
When you click the Live view, it doesn't look the same.
So, there's a couple of changes that need to be made here, right out of the gate, but you'll notice at this point, I really can't make any changes.
I can't select any of the text.
I don't really have much in the way that I can do to this page.
And that's the way templates work.
By default, everything is locked within the page that is based upon the template.
What you have to do is go into the template and mark regions as Editable Regions.
Additionally, you have to take further care to make sure that your stylesheet files can be applied to these children pages.
We're going to take a look at all of these things over the next couple of movies.
