I decided to do a complete redesign for www.thechessworld.com using Dreamweaver 8 as a main tool. I designed a new template but when I created new page using this template and add some text to it Dreamweaver gave me the following: “This change would require changing code which is locked by a template or a translator. The change will be discarded.”

What to do about it? Please help, ASAP!

Why don't you just not use the templating system? It should be easy enough to use only HTML, CSS and images to update the site. In the meantime, you should probably study up on HTML and CSS. Dreamweaver tends to be a bad tool for non-professionals. I recommend you start looking at the code more, and take some tuturials so you can understand HTML structure better. It won't take long for you to get the basics.

Thank you for the advise. I will study HTML sometime soon. I thought that templates would make website updates a alot easier: say I need to add a new button to the menu to every page of my 100 pages website, I'll just change template and that's it.. otherwise I'll have to do it manually.
Okay, what about the current problem? How do you make it work??

Originally Posted by wayfarer07

Why don't you just not use the templating system? It should be easy enough to use only HTML, CSS and images to update the site. In the meantime, you should probably study up on HTML and CSS. Dreamweaver tends to be a bad tool for non-professionals. I recommend you start looking at the code more, and take some tuturials so you can understand HTML structure better. It won't take long for you to get the basics.

I do templating dynamically, from the server. You're right that templating can speed things up dramatically. Your example about adding a new button to 100 pages is exactly on. Professionals almost always do this with a technique called Server-Side-Includes. This can be somewhat intimidating, because it means programming the server, but in fact it is a very basic and easy concept.

Here is an overview:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Side_Includes

I do it with PHP, however, which is even easier, using the "include" function:
http://us.php.net/include/

otherwise I'll have to do it manually.

Not necessarily. Another solution to that scenario would be use server-side includes.

You can open up the Dreamweaver files in notepad, take out the editable area tags, then re-open in DW to continue editing - but your page won't be templated any more.

i have apage with two lbrary items and i was trying to add another library items; i got the error "locked by a template or a translator ERROR"! message!!
How do i solve this? please!!

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