Dreamweaver MX 2004: The Missing Manual

Chapter 21. Getting Started with Dynamic Web Sites

The Dynamic Edge

So far in this book, you’ve learned to build and maintain Web sites using Dreamweaver MX 2004’s powerful design, coding, and site management tools. The pages you’ve created are straightforward HTML, which you can immediately preview in a Web browser to see a finished design. These kinds of pages are often called static, since they don’t change once you’ve finished creating them. For many Web sites, especially ones that contain a variety of information, static Web pages are the way to go.

But imagine landing a contract to build an online catalog of 10,000 products. After the initial excitement disappears (along with your plans for that trip to Hawaii), you realize that even using Dreamweaver’s Template tool (Chapter 18), building 10,000 pages is a lot of work!

Fortunately, Dreamweaver MX 2004 offers a better and faster way to deal with this problem. Its dynamic Web site creation tools let you take advantage of a variety of powerful techniques that would be difficult or impossible to implement with plain HTML pages. With Dreamweaver MX 2004, you can build pages that:

• Display listings of products or other items like your record collection, your company’s staff directory, or your mother’s library of prized recipes.

• Search through a database of information and display the results.

• Require login so you can hide particular areas from prying eyes.

• Collect and store information from visitors to your site.

• Personalize your visitors’ ...