Links in templates
When you create a template file by saving an existing page as a template, the new template in the Templates folder, and any links in the file are updated so that their document-relative paths are correct. Later, when you create a document based on that template and save it, all the document-relative links are updated again to continue to point to the correct files.
When you add a new document-relative link to a template file, it’s easy to enter the wrong path name if you type the path into the link text box in the Property inspector. The correct path in a template file is the path from the Templates folder to the linked document, not the path from the template-based document’s folder to the linked document. Ensure that the correct paths for links exist by using either the folder icon or the Point-to-file icon in the Property inspector when creating links in templates.
Dreamweaver 8.01 link update preference
Previous to Dreamweaver 8 (that is, Dreamweaver MX 2004 and earlier), Dreamweaver did not update links to files that resided in the Templates folder. (For example, if you had a file called main.css in the Templates folder, and had written href=”main.css” as a link in the template file, Dreamweaver would not update this link when creating a template-based page.)
Some users took advantage of the way Dreamweaver treated links to files in the Templates folder, and used this inconsistency to create links that they intentionally did not want to update when creating template-based pages. For example, if you are using Dreamweaver MX 2004, and have a site with different folders for different applications—Dreamweaver, Flash, and Photoshop. Each product folder contains a template-based index.html page, and a unique version of the main.css file at the same level. If the template file contains the document-relative link href=”main.css” (a link to a version of the main.css file in the Templates folder), and you want your template-based index.html pages also to contain this link as written, you can create the template-based index.html pages without having to worry about Dreamweaver updating those particular links. When Dreamweaver MX 2004 creates the template-based index.html pages, the (un-updated) href=”main.css” links refer to the main.css files that reside in the Dreamweaver, Flash, and Photoshop folders, not to the main.css file that resides in the Templates folder.
In Dreamweaver 8, however, this behavior was changed so that all document-relative links are updated when creating template-based pages, regardless of the apparent location of the linked files. In this scenario, Dreamweaver examines the link in the template file (href="main.css") and creates a link in the template-based page that is relative to the location of the new document. For example, if you are creating a template-based document one level up from the Templates folder, Dreamweaver would write the link in the new document as href=”Templates/main.css”. This update in Dreamweaver 8 broke links in pages created by those designers who had taken advantage of Dreamweaver’s former practice of not updating links to files in the Templates folder.
Dreamweaver 8.01 added a preference that enables you to turn the update relative links behavior on and off. (This special preference only applies to links to files in the Templates folder, not to links in general.) The default behavior is to not update these links (as in Dreamweaver MX 2004 and before), but if you want Dreamweaver to update these kinds of links when creating template-based pages, you can deselect the preference. (You would only do this if, for example, you had a Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) page, main.css, in your Templates folder, and you wanted a template-based document to contain the link href=”Templates/main.css”; but this is not recommended practice as only Dreamweaver template (DWT) files should reside in the Templates folder.)
To have Dreamweaver update document-relative paths to non-template files in the Templates folder, select the Templates category on the Advanced tab of the Site Definition dialog box, and deselect the Don’t Rewrite Document Relative Paths option.
For more information, see the Dreamweaver TechNote on the Adobe website at www.adobe.com/go/f55d8739