These are a few scripts to manipulate Dreamweaver templates from the command line (without Dreamweaver). I made these so I could work with people who use Dreamweaver, without having to purchase or use it myself. These could also potentially be useful for integrating CGI scripts with the over-all look of a site designed with Dreamweaver. They are licensed under the GPL.

See INSTALL for information on how to set up the modules.

There are four scripts included:

dt-apply	Apply a template to files
dt-new	Convert a non-Dreamweaver HTML file to be used with a template
dt-refresh	Refresh the template for files
dt-remove	Remove the template from a file

Do dt-* --help to get specific usage information. All the commands modify pages in-place (i.e., they overwrite the file).

I'm not sure if there's anything really useful about dt-remove, but...

Download

dw-templates_0.1.tar.gz
browse the code

Dreamweaver templates explained

This is my understanding of how Dreamweaver templates work -- this is useful if you want to do any editting. I've only looked at the output of Dreamweaver 2.0 -- maybe 3.0 changes things.

A template looks like a normal HTML file, except that certain portions are marked editable. Like this:

  <!-- #BeginEditable "fieldname" -->
  The default contents of this area
  <!-- #EndEditable -->

This should seem fairly obvious. The Dreamweaver interface doesn't seem to allow any way to make elements that are not in the body, except for the title. These scripts don't make any such assumption, though.

The default extension for Dreamweaver templates is .dwt, and generally Dreamweaver puts all templates in /Templates.

The HTML files look very similar to templates. The editable regions remained marked, but their contents are changed. Another tag is added to the top (and closed at the bottom) to tell which template has been used, like:

  <!-- BeginTemplate "/Templates/basic.dwt" -->
  The entire document...
  <!-- EndTemplate -->

I haven't encountered a page with multiple templates, the scripts don't support it. I don't even know what it means. Dreamweaver also doesn't put the #BeginTemplate/#EndTemplate quite at the top and bottom of the page, but I don't know why. The scripts don't follow this behavior.

The template name ("/Templates/basic.dwt") is relative to the Site Root ("/"). You define this in Dreamweaver when you set a site up, but in the scripts you can use the option --root=<some-path>.

In Dreamweaver when you apply a template and a field will be lost, it gives you an interactive warning. The scripts aren't interactive, but I save left-over fields at the end of the file in comments, so they can be retrieved later if you change the field name or use a different template. Use --drop-unused to get rid of these trailing comments, -w to get warnings about them for dt-apply.

Use dt-new to import pages that don't currently use a Dreamweaver template. By default, the title is put into the field "doctitle" (which is the default for Dreamweaver) and the body is put in "docbody" (Dreamweaver doesn't have a default for this, so this is arbitrary on my part).

Hopefully that covers everything. Questions, comments, or bugs can come to me at ianb@colorstudy.com

Enjoy.