Adobe Dreamweaver
About
Adobe Dreamweaver is basically THE program of choice for professional website development. Like all Adobe products it's very powerful and in my opinion the best features of Dreamweaver are its use of CSS styles and templates, which allow you to change the look, feel and style of multiple pages in your site by changing a single file. It also features code snippets (for php etc), a code reference library, and uploading (FTP etc) is built in so you can easily upload ("put") and download ("get") files in your site.
NOTE: This product was called "Macromedia Dreamweaver" up until 2006 when Adobe bought them out.
Creating and Managing a Site
Within Dreamweaver you specify multiple "sites". To create a new site go: "Sites >> Manage Site" (in menu at top) and then click "New" Fill in the template, making sure to chose the root directory, and set up FTP.
To edit the site later click "Edit", and I find "Advanced" easier. You can click "Test" to see if the connection is okay. An example:
- Access: .................. FTP
- FTP host: ............... mysite.com
- Host directory: ........ mysite.com/pubic_html/
- Login: ..................... myusername
- Password: .............. **********
On slower connections selecting "use passive FTP" might help, click "Ok" and "Done"
Editing and Uploading Files
If all is the connection is working correctly the process for updating files is:
- In the "files panel" (bottom right side) double click the file you want to open (eg: about.htm)
- Change/edit the file
- Save the file [Ctrl+S] (and you'll notice the little asterix next to it disappears)
- Select the file in the "files panel" and click the "Put" button (the blue arrow pointing up)
... at this stage it will connect .. watch the little bar and it should connect successfully, then delete the old page on the server, then uploads the new one.
Now open the page (eg: http://www.mysite.com/about.htm) Internet Explorer, hit Refresh [F5] and the page should be changed.
Child Pages
Related/Child Pages:
- Adobe Dreamweaver - adding new extensions and syntax highlighting - a separate page I wrote demonstrating how you can add your own syntax highlighting for a new file time, using Python (.py) as an example.
- Adobe Dreamweaver - adding syntax highlighting for SQL - shows how you can add syntax highlighting for SQL / postgreSQL pages.
