Editing Templates

To edit your templates, simply open the assets panel, click the templates icon, and double-click on the template name to open it in the document window. Here you can edit the template as you would normally edit any Web page.

Any changes you make can be automatically revised in all other pages on your site that use that template. Dreamweaver will ask you if you want to update these other pages that use the template. Simply click the Update button and allow Dreamweaver to update your template-based pages throughout your site.

You can also force an update of the site (or a single page) by choosing Modify > Templates > Update Pages (or Update Current Page). Here you can choose to update the current site (all templates and library items) or just the files that use a specific template. You can also use this procedure to update library items on your site. You can update templates and library items at the same time.

Detaching Templates

What happens if you have a document you created with a template, but you later want to make changes to regions that are locked? You can always open the original template file and unlock the area you want to work on, but that will also affect all the other pages built with that template.

As we already discussed with library items, a better solution might be to simply detach the template from the page. To do this, open the Web page you created with the template and choose Modify > Templates > Detach From Template.

Now your previously-locked regions on the page are all fully editable. Be forewarned, however, that once you detach the template from your page, changing the template and updating your site will no longer update any pages that were detached.