Lockergnome’s Top 50 Dreamweaver Tips

“For Webmasters” Make Dreamweaver 4 (with many of these tips also applying to v3 as well) work more effectively for your Web development efforts. With tips ranging in scope from interface tweaks for the application itself, to more effective HTML coding and recommendations on writing better code, to specifics on making Web develoment with Dreamweaver easier, this collection of tips will help you to spend less time wading through the application itself and more time actually working on code. Author Dennis Jarrett’s tips will help you eliminate frustration and make your Web development ride a smooth one. [ 50 Tips for $5 / Download ]

Customizing menus

Dreamweaver’s menu customization is crude by comparison with snappier Microsoft-type options in other programs, but at least it is possible. The content and order of Dreamweaver’s menus is determined by a file called menus.xml, which you’ll find in the program’s /Configuration/Menus folder within Program Files. Edit this with a standard text editor; Notepad will do, WordPad is probably easier. Don’t try using Dreamweaver itself.

You can cut or copy entire menu items – everything between the brackets of a MENUITEM tag – and paste it into a new location. Just make sure that the menuitem is going inside a MENU tag, between and .

You can do the same cut-and-paste for entire menus, picking up everything inside the menu tags. You can also add or move a separator bar within the menu by entering a tag between two menuitem tags. And you can create submenus with menus – add a new menu tag pair inside an existing one, put some menuitems in the new submenu.

This way you can move menu items within a menu or from one menu to another, copy them into another menu, remove items from menus, move menus within a menu bar or even from one menu bar to another, and add or remove separators and submenus.