Summary

Chapter 9 - Hand Coding Within Dreamweaver MX
byGareth Downes-Powellet al.
Wrox Press 2003

In this chapter we've taken a brief look at PHP hand coding. This should make the code that Dreamweaver MX produces easier to understand, and help you along the way to create your own PHP code.

We also looked at why you might need to hand code within Dreamweaver MX, and how to switch to Code view or open the Code inspector. We've discussed the Preferences, which affect the way your code is displayed, and the new hand coding tools, which make their debut in Dreamweaver MX.

We next looked at good code practices for hand coding, to make your code neater and easier to follow, and discussed the various features, like indenting and commenting, that you can use.

In the last section, we created a user login system using hand coding, which verified a username and encrypted password against those stored in a database and set the user's status to one of two levels. We looked at putting generic functions in an include file, and how to add different levels of protection to your pages, by inserting a small code block at the top of the page.

In the next chapter, we're going to look at how to construct our own server behaviors, to make automating common tasks in Dreamweaver MX easier.