Extensions in Dreamweaver are kind of like filters in Photoshop. They add new abilities to the program and they are usually created by a third party, not by macromedia or I guess I need to get used to saying adobe by now. As you see on the side of Chaosweaver which is a company known for making extensions. You can download a number of different kinds of extensions.
When I click on the extensions button here, I see a list of options. Everything from shopping carts to random effects, to image options. These are all added functionality that work in conjunction with Dreamweaver. In this lesson, I am going to show you how to use a free extension from Chaosweaver that lets you create a feature I got in many requests for. It is a random image slide show that lets you put a series of images on the front page or any page on your website randomly from a folder of images.
If you are a programmer, you can create this kind of functionality yourself. Dreamweaver has lots of programming tools. But if you are not, this is the easiest way I found to add a random image feature. To install extensions, you will need this little utility called the extension manager. I am going to command option H just to hide everything in the background. You will notice there is a little button at the top here, a little icon for exchange. And if you click on that, it will launch a browser and take you to the macromedia exchange server.
Now, you can download extensions directly from a website like Chaosweaver but I wanted to make sure you knew about the exchange server because this is kind of the central clearing house for extensions and it is a great place to learn about new tools. If you scroll through here, you will see there are number of ways to find extensions on this site. You can just scroll through the options here. You can also search by highest rated, newest, most downloaded and there is a search utility that lets you search by keyword.
Notice here that for each extension, you can find out if it is available for Windows, Mac or Windows and Mac. How many times it has been downloaded? What kind of rating it have? And perhaps most importantly, which products it works with? Now, I will tell you a lot of extensions that say they work with MX 2004 or even MX will still work with Dreamweaver 8 but not all of them.
Of course, if you download one and it does not work, you can always remove it. But some of this cost money so you may want to make sure you have got an extension that is compatible with your version before you pay for it. Extensions tend to cost somewhere between about $20.00 and $50.00 a piece. Although some of them are hundreds of dollars especially the ones that you can use to create full launch shopping card systems and ecommerce solutions. So, the more complex and advance the extension and some of them are full featured programs in themselves. Those will be more expensive.
But a lot of extensions are actually free and you will find many developers create a few cool extensions, offer them for free and use them to entice you to their website where they will sell you more. I do not knock them for that, I actually think that is a great service to the community, there are a lot of free extensions out there as a result and ones you find a free one that you like, it is a good indicator that it is created by a company you can trust to purchase extensions from in the future.
You can also do searches. So, if I click on search exchanges, then I can do keyword search to find anything I might be looking for. Now, there are extensions on so many different topics but I am looking for one that will serve random images on my website. So, these are all of the scripts on this exchange server that match the keyword random images. If I scroll down, I find a lot of this cost money but there is a pretty good one here again from Chaosweaver called advanced random images and that is one that I want to click on to download. I encourage you to do this with me because I am actually going to use this one in the lesson. It is free and you can download it for the Mac or windows machine.
So, just click on the download button. Now, you do have to register to use this server. You do not have to pay anything for this registration. But if you are not registered, take a moment to do so. If you are registered, just login and continue. And then you just click okay and then of course, you have to accept the little disclaimer and extensions download pretty quickly unless they are big complex ones so click okay and notice that extension manager has downloaded and installed this automatically.
If you have downloaded and save this to your hard drive, you can just choose install. Go find the extension wherever you saved it and install it yourself. I am going to backup to the exchange server while I am here and download one other extension just to give you a range of options. Again, if you notice here you have highest rated, newest and most downloaded, this is a great way to find some of the best extensions on the server. I am going to look at the most downloaded list and I am going to choose flash buttons, additional flash button styles.
Now, there are lots and lost of flash button extensions and what they do is add more flash button options into Dreamweavers flash button feature. I am going to show you how that works in just a second but let us go ahead and download it. Again, you wanted to just go ahead and open it. Click okay, as soon as you accept the disclaimer. Dreamweaver automatically downloads it and solve it and it is ready to go.
I can see from this little bouncing icon at the bottom that Firefox wants my attention but I am done with it. So, I am just going to command tab over to Firefox, quit the application because I am done downloading extensions and comeback to the extension manager.
