Chapter 5: Managing Site Assets And Libraries; About Library Items - MACROMEDIA DREAMWEAVER MX 2004-USING DREAMWEAVER Use Manual

As you develop websites, you accumulate a growing number of assets. In some cases, you might
use the same assets across multiple sites, or perhaps you have a set of favored assets that you use in
all your sites. You can use Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 to manage your site assets. You
can easily keep track of and preview several kinds of assets that you have stored in your site, such
as images, movies, colors, scripts, and links. You can also drag an asset directly to your current
document to insert it in a page.
Dreamweaver also provides access to two special types of assets—libraries and templates. Library
items and templates are linked assets: editing a library item or template updates all documents in
which these assets have been applied. Library items are intended for individual design elements,
such as a site's copyright information or a logo. Templates let you control a larger design area. (For
more information, see
The following topics are covered in this chapter:
•
"About library items" on page 115
•
"Working with assets" on page 116
•
"Creating and managing a list of favorite assets" on page 123
•
"Working with library items" on page 125

About library items

A library is a special Dreamweaver file that contains a collection of individual assets or copies of
assets you have created for placement in your web pages. These assets in a library are called library
items. You can update all the pages that use a library item whenever you change the item's
contents. You can store all sorts of page elements, such as images, tables, sounds, and Flash files in
a library.
Here's an example of how you might use a library item: suppose you're building a large site for a
company. The company has a slogan that it wants to appear on every page of the site, but the
marketing department is still finalizing the text of the slogan. If you create a library item to
contain the slogan and use that library item on every page, then when the marketing department
provides the final slogan, you can change the library item and automatically update every page
that uses it.
Managing Site Assets and Libraries
Chapter 11, "Managing Templates," on page
CHAPTER 5
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