Right out of the box, Adobe Dreamweaver is an amazing application, chocked full of features that make designing websites a bigger piece of cake than hand-coding.
Even with all its functional goodness, there are still some things that could be done more easily and/or are missing from the basic application, and that's where extensions come in.
Extensions allow you to augment Dreamweaver's capabilities.
A site called, Japan Interface, offers four such extensions for free.
One of their extensions is called Lorem and More. You will also find it in the Adobe Extension repository.
Lorem and More allows you to create placeholder text when designing webpages. This comes in handy if you don't actually have the final content for your site. Having some placeholder content, as opposed to just designing on an empty page, helps you get a better idea of how the page will look once it's live on the web.
The more in Lorem and More represents the fact that you have four choices for the kind of placeholder text the extension will generate: Lorem Ipsum (the most popular kind), Corporate Mumbo-Jumbo (real words that sound technical), sonnets by Shakespeare and speeches by Cicero. You can have Lorem and More create groups of words, ordered and unordered lists and paragraphs from these four text choices.
Another of Japan Interface's extensions is called Smart Link, and it is also approved and found in the Adobe Extension repository.
The creator of the extension says the following:
Smart Link converts an existing link so that the target page opens in a new browser window.
The functionality you get with Smart Link is similar to the Dreamweaver behavior, Open Browser Window. The difference is that when you create a link with Smart Link, but your visitor has blocked JavaScript, there is code built into the link created by Smart Link to go ahead and show the page correctly as opposed to showing nothing or an error message, which is what happens with the Open Browser Window behavior.
The next two extensions are for older versions of Dreamweaver; version 4, MX and MX 2004. There are still people who use the older versions, so that's why these last two extensions are included in this article.
The third free extension by Japan Interface is Banish Tooltips.
This extension comes in handy when you're trying to make your web pages Section 508 compliant. Banish Tooltips will remove title text that causes issues with screen readers. It will also remove alternate text on spacer images.
Essentially, what Banish Tooltips is designed to do is create a more seamless listening experience for no-vision/low-vision web surfers who are using screen readers, like Jaws.
The last extension by Japan Interface is called Fractions and Power Symbols.
Although later versions of Dreamweaver come standard with several symbols (also known as special characters and/or HTML entities),older versions of Dreamweaver don't include all the symbols in later versions. You may find yourself consulting a printed resource or going to a search engine to find the codes for symbols on the web that are not in the Dreamweaver application.
The creator has this to say about the Fractions and Power Symbols extensions:
"Inserts the correct HTML entities for common fractions (¼, ½, ¾), powers (squared and cubed — n², n³) and the degree symbol (°) into your web page."
Hopefully, one or some of these extensions will be useful to you.
Keep reading this column for more information about extensions from other sources.
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