How do I make a template in Adobe Dreamweaver?

Hello, lovely Dreamweaver people, it's time to make a Template. In this video we're going to make this thing here. It looks exactly the same as the last video but now it's called a '.dwt', and we have this thing called an editable region. What that means is I can make loads of pages and update the Template, which has got my Header and Footer, and it will spill through, and update all the pages in one big file swoop. Okay, let's learn how to do that in Dreamweaver.

First thing I want to do before I make my Template, is actually, there's a bit of text in here I want to get rid of. You can do it in Code view or Live view, doesn't matter, I prefer it in Code view. So Text gone. Now we're going to save it as a Template. Now if I've got anything selected up here in my Live view and I go 'File', 'Save as Template', it's grayed out for some reason, but if I click down here, in Code view, and go to the exact same option, comes to life, not sure why. Okay, 'description', I never give it a description but in terms of 'Save As', this is quite important. So 'index' is a bad name for it. We're going to call ours 'portfolio-template'. No spaces, don't use any crazy characters. And click 'Save'. 'Update Links?', Click 'Yes'.

One of the problems I had when I was making this course is, back in video 4, I, under 'Site', 'Manage Sites', under my site name, when we named this, I put in 'apostrophe s' both in the site name and in the folder that's on my Desktop. That caused problems for nothing except for this Template. So it was a bit of an eye opener for me. So just make sure, if you are having problems with your Template, that you don't have any funny characters in either the site name, or the local folder name. I'm pretty sure it was the local folder name that was causing the issues. Cancel all that, done, it all saved to Template, awesome.

Now what's actually happened, couple of things, a bit of code that's been added, that wasn't there before. You can see, 'TemplateBeginEditable' doctitle, there's a bunch of these that have been added. The other thing is, you can see up here, the extension 'dwt' is been added, that is Dreamweaver Template. We've also noticed, in our site files, you can see here, that's a new folder that's been made. Inside of it, there's my portfolio. Also, when you're working with Templates you'll notice that Live view doesn't work as well as it used to. Still functioning, and works kind off, but it's a little bit harder to use than it was when it was not a Template. That's no problem, and I also find that when I first generate it, if I close it down and reopen it, it's going to say, "Warning: You don't have any editable areas," and I'm like, "Cool, I need to fix that." Let's close it, reopen it back up. Generally works a whole lot better. Quirks for Dreamweaver, lovely, we love them.

So now what I want to do is I need that editable region, because at the moment, everything's part of the Template, and if I make new pages based on this Template, there's going to be nothing I can do to it, they're all locked. So what I want to do is, click where our-- remember, our main Content Box was here. You'll notice, it didn't highlight like it used to, it's one of the quirks. It has highlighted down here. But if I go to 'Insert', 'Template', 'Editable Region' remember, it doesn't really work for working in this Live view anymore, so we have to use a little bit more Code view.

So I'm going to highlight these guys. 'Main', because that's the bit that I want to be editable. Go to 'Insert', go to 'Template', and I'm going to make this my 'Editable Region'. What am I going to call it? 'Editable Region 3'? Let's call this one 'main-content'. Click 'OK'. You'll see, it gets wrapped up in this tag, and that's going to allow it to be editable. Let's hit 'Save'.

And that is how you create a Template. In the next video we'll show you how to generate a page from this Template. All right, let's go and do that now.