Adobe Dreamweaver Team Blog

It's easy enough to insert Spry widgets in Dreamweaver, but customizing them is another matter. Surprisingly, there are not a great number of resources out there that show folks how to customize Spry widgets. Below are some of the more popular and useful ones that might help you get to where you want to go.

Spry widget samples (ADOBE)
Code and styling samples of all of the Adobe Spry widgets, directly from the Adobe Spry team.

Customizing Spry Menu Bars in Dreamweaver (JUST DREAMWEAVER)
Resource page offering various Spry Menu Bar information available out on the Web.

Creating Custom Spry Widgets: Dreamweaver CS3 (LYNDA.COM)
Video series showing how to insert and modify a Sliding Panels widget.

Tabbed Panels and Menu Bar widgets: Dreamweaver CS3 (PEACHPIT PRESS)
Basic tutorial on inserting and styling Tabbed Panels and Menu Bar widgets.

Spry Validation widgets (LAYERS MAGAZINE)
Video tutorial on inserting and styling Spry form validation widgets.

Building Spry pages visually (ADOBE)
The Dreamweaver Help system. Each widget contains a customization section, which links out to the larger Spry Developer's Guide.

We get a lot (and I mean A LOT) of queries about CSS layouts -- what are they, how do they work, where do I go to start? Here are just a few of some of the best resources out there if you are trying to tackle this formidable but popular beast:

From table-based to tableless web design (ADOBE)
Popular two-part tutorial series on building a CSS layout from scratch, and converting table-based layouts to pure CSS.

CSS page layout basics (ADOBE)
Explanation of a basic CSS layout that breaks down the structure and rules that create the layout.

Creating a CSS layout from scratch (SUBCIDE)
An older but still quite useful step-by-step tutorial on creating a CSS layout.

Building your first CSS site (ADOBE)
Steps beginners through the process of defining structural elements and then styling them.

Tableless layouts with Dreamweaver CS4 (ADOBE)
Shows you how to create a simple two-column CSS layout.

Creating a simple three-column design (ADOBE)
Shows you how to build a three-column design, including using the "faux column" technique

Dreamweaver CSS starter layouts (ADOBE)
An article written for Dreamweaver CS3, but still useful as the starter layouts did not change in CS4.

Create a page with a CSS layout (ADOBE)
The Dreamweaver CS4 Help doc equivalent to the above starter layouts article.

CSS layout (HTML SOURCE)
A popular article describing many of the most common terms and principles used for CSS layouts.

In Search of the Holy Grail (A LIST APART)
Elegant article on creating the "holy grail" of CSS layouts: the three-column, fixed-width sidebars, liquid center layout.

There have been many, many posts on the Dreamweaver forums about problems with displaying FLV files. We've just updated the CS4 documentation to include a new troubleshooting section that might help a lot of you who are having problems. As this is a much-talked-about issue, please publicize this troubleshooting information as much as possible on other blogs and forums if you're able to do that.

Special thanks to David Powers who originally alerted us to the need for such a doc.

The doc does not and cannot cover all issues. There are still many users for whom this doc won't provide a solution. But hopefully, the information provided will be able to help a good majority of people having trouble with FLV.

I wanted to alert everyone to another great new Community article published by Adobe Community Expert David Powers. The article details how to attach CSS style sheets automatically when you create new documents.

Here's the article:
http://kb2.adobe.com/community/publishing/505/cpsid_50564.html

This handy option is easy to miss, especially if you don't use the New Document Dialog box to create documents, so big thanks to David for highlighting this.

Furthermore, the appearance of such an article is a great example of how Community content can interact and live symbiotically with Adobe Help. We've linked directly to David's piece from our documentation, and this is indeed a great thing because David is able to go into much more detail about the process of automatically attaching style sheets than we are able to do in Help:

Create a blank page
Create a page with a CSS layout

If you're interested in publishing Community articles of your own, download the Community Publishing AIR application.

I wanted to alert everyone to a great new Community article published by Adobe Community Expert David Powers. The article details the various best practices and methods for changing the colors of Accordion, Tabbed Panels, and Collapsible Panel widgets, including tab backgrounds, borders, and so on.

Here's the article:

http://kb2.adobe.com/community/publishing/504/cpsid_50437.html

Customization questions are pretty frequent in both the Spry and Dreamweaver forums. This new styling guide is sure to answer lots of peoples' questions.

Furthermore, the appearance of such an article is a great example of how Community content can interact and live symbiotically with Adobe Help. We've linked directly to David's piece from our own customization pages for the Spry Accordion, Tabbed Panels, and Collapsible Panels widgets:

Customize the Accordion widget
Customize the Tabbed Panels widget
Customize the Collapsible Panels widget

Thanks a lot to David for hammering out this article.

If you're interested in publishing Community articles of your own, you can download the Community Publishing AIR application and get right to work!