Arrgh.  OK, bear me out, I'm mostly just venting.

DW is making me pull my hair out.  I'll be working on a file and suddenly it freaks out that I'm changing part of the file outside the editable regions of the template and asks if I want to remove or keep but that it will be lost.

I say"keep it" and yet it reverts my entire page back to how it was when I opened it!

Arg, and the kicker is, I was nowhere near the edit boundaries!!!

The incident that spurred me to rant is just now I saved and everything was fine, I then immediately tried to "save as" it into a backup (not having so much as touched the keyboard) and it did the freakout.

I've also had a strange, and persistant bug for over a year now, where I'll change a template, it'll update all the files, I go to my browser to check it, go back to DW and there's the Update Files box again.  I've asked Macromedia about it (before the buy-out) and never got a response.

Ah well, it's ability to auto-populate the various HTML tags, CSS values, and most of the PHP code is going to make me keep it around.

Yeah, I shut DW down and restarted it after my rant.  The page opened up without the reverting haven taken place.

I didn't know whether to laugh or cry as I had redone that page 3 times due to the bug only to find out that all I had to do was close and reopen it.

Ah well.  Glad it's not just me. 

Yeah me too.  I rarely go into the design screen.  With more and more of my content being generated by PHP, it either looks empty or exploded.

I think my issue this time was with a messed up way I was handling div tags and DW lost track of what was where.  I rethought my strategy and it seems to be running fine now.  However, I have had that issue crop up on a simple HTML page too.

I'm curious...which version of DW are you using? DW MX or DW 8?

I use dreamweaver as a replacement for notepad, meaning just for coding (syntax errors, php syntax, php functions, etc). I don't even know half of what DW could do
I've heard of the template thingie though, havent really used it

I use dreamweaver mx and I used to have the template issue quite often. I have removed most of the use of templates. I find that using includes is so much easier in the long run for keeping look and feel consistant. Not having to watch the FTP window chug along forever after a template change was worth the effort to elimenate the templates.

The template feature is kinda neat.  It's basically a generic page with no content.  You then tell DW what the editable regions are.

Thus if somebody else creates a page from the template (using DW of course) they can't get to the underlying code so that you can preserve the page format. Not an issue with me. 

What I like about it is that it keep track of the pages created by a template so if you make a change to it, say a different background or add a new link to a nav bar, it cascades down to all the child pages rather than you having to change each and every page.  (Those tow options can be done better by CSS and SSI includes I know, but I hope you get my drift. )

DW templates don't work that way, or at least the way I use them.

Like you, I have my navigation bar display the current page in a different color.  The nav bar is brought in by a PHP include statement and the color is controlled by CSS and a div tag.

Hmm, here's another thing, DW templates don't affect the base code and don't mean diddly outside DW.  The template code is actually just HTML comments
<!-- template begin editable region "gobbledygook" -->yadda<!-- template end editable -->

Therefore you're not locked into using only DW to edit the files.  Thus you can change the file outside DW if need be, which I've had to do when I'm on the road and something comes up.  I'll use Cpanel's file manager to make the changes.