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Using Tom Muck’s PHP Horizontal Looper in the Online Gallery

Revised instructions for pages 420-1

The MX Looper extension from InterAKT is no longer available as a separate product either as a 30-day free trial or for purchase. Fortunately, there Tom Muck has created an alternative that will enable you to finish the online gallery in Chapter 11 of Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8.

Tom Muck's looper extension comes in two versions—a free one that performs the basic task of looping a recordset across several rows and columns, and a commercial one ($19) that offers a number of advanced features. These revised instructions are based on the free version, but you may want to consider buying the commercial one. Tom is a well-respected member of the Dreamweaver community and has a lot of experience developing Dreamweaver extensions.

  1. Go to Tom Muck's site and download either the free horizontal looper (make sure you get the one for PHP) or the commercial one. Use the Extension Manager to install the extension and restart Dreamweaver.
  2. Do steps 1 and 2 on page 420 as described in Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8.
  3. With the dynamic image placeholder for the thumbnail still higlighted click the + button on the Server Behaviors panel and select DW Team > Horizontal Looper MX.
  4. In the dialog box that opens, select getPictures as the recordset, make sure that the first radio button is selected, and insert 5 in the Rows field and 3 in the Columns field as shown in the following screenshot. Finally, click OK.

    Horizontal Looper MX dialog box

  5. Tom Muck's Horizontal looper doesn't insert a border around the table cells, nor is it listed in the Server Behaviors panel, so you can ignore the whole of step 5 in the original instructions in the book.
  6. The rest of the instructions are exactly the same as in the book from step 6 on page 421.
Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8