another forum

htmler — Tue, 27 Nov 2001 18:24:02 +0000

oops, i almost forgot...

there is a forum specifically designed for Dreamweaver users and Macromedia's employees constantly answer questions- and they usually have good answers.

it's a usenet group:
http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&group=macromedia.dreamweaver

it can also be reached thru this site:
http://www.siteexperts.com/nntp/outputThreads.asp?msg_group=macromedia%2Edreamweaver

htmler — Tue, 27 Nov 2001 17:48:51 +0000

I think it depends on what you want the library and templates to do. When you Define a site in DW, it lets you create assets (templates and library items are just a few, colors, urls, images, etc, are other useful assets) that are shared for the entire site. For each Defined Site, you have to create different templates and libraries because they are not shared across Defined Sites.

So, if you want to share assets (like images or templates) across your smaller sites then they need to be within your larger site. However, if you would like each small site to have it's own assets that aren't shared then you need to define each site separately. The size of your sites might be important. If each small site is actually quite large and you have all your small sites in one very large site, then your assets will be huge (i.e. in the Image asset you will have tons of images) and may become unmanageable or will not be useful.

Just remember, for the updating of templates and link management, you cannot define a site within a site.

Brian Farkas — Tue, 27 Nov 2001 01:00:34 +0000

What you'll probably want to do is create a template for each different sub-site, and then apply that template to all of those pages. When you do that, you can update one template and it will update all the files attached to that template. If you're going to need to update something across the ENTIRE site, I'd recommend you do a combination of templates and server side includes.

Please let me know if you need any more help/clarification.
Good luck!