Subtitles of the Movie

My students and clients often get the concepts of local root folder and remote folders confused, so let me spend some time clarifying these issues in this movie by reviewing some techniques and some theory that you'll need to work through this. When you want to use Dreamweaver to connect to a remote folder you need to specify in the remote info category of the site definition dialog box your access information such as whether you want to access via FTP, local area network, WebDAV, RDS and so on as well as an FTP host, address, login and password information. The remote folder that you specify here also sometimes referred to as the host directory should directly correspond to the local root folder of your Dreamweaver site. Remember that's the information that you define here under the local root folder, dialog right there. You can also browse to the location of that local root folder. This local root folder is the top-level folder of your Dreamweaver site. Remotes folders like local folders can have any title but commonly Internet service providers name the top-level remote folders for individual user accounts such as public dot HTML or pub underscore HTML or something similar. You'll want to check with your local host to make sure that you have the right remote folder identified. When you first establish a remote connection, the remote folder on the web server is usually pretty empty. There may be some files that your host has placed there but none of your local files will be there. Then when you use Dreamweaver to upload all of these local files to your remote folder, the remote folder populates with all of your web files. Now it's important that the directory structure of the remote folder be identical to the folder structure of your local root folder. If the structure of this remote folder isn't the same, Dreamweaver will then upload files to the wrong location where they may not be visible to site visitors over here on your remote side. Additionally, image and link paths can easily break when folder and file structures are not in sync between the remote and local file site. One very useful tool for helping you manage the files and folders in your local root folder are Dreamweaver sitemaps. You can view a local folder for a Dreamweaver site as a visual map of linked icons called a sitemap. You can see the sitemap if you open up the files window and then choose from the main menu up here, view, sitemap. The sitemap shows the site structure two levels deep starting from a designated home page. It shows pages as icons and displays links here in the order in which they are encountered in the source code. So for example here in my index page, this is the first link encountered in the source code and this is the last link, sitemap dot HTM. Now before you can display this sitemap you must define a homepage for your site. The site's homepage is the starting point of the map and can be any page in your site. You define this from the site menu, set up a new homepage and then type in the filename or you can select a file over here in the files window. Let's go ahead and do content one dot HTM. Choose site and set this as the homepage. First time you try to view your sitemap, Dreamweaver will warn you that you need to define a homepage. You can change the homepage, the number of columns displayed, whether the icon labels display the filename or the page title and whether to show hidden or dependent files. When working here in the sitemap you can select pages, open pages for editing, add new pages to the site, create links between files and change page titles. This is a very visual way of working. Sometimes this is much easier especially when you're starting off creating your very first few Dreamweaver sites to work here in the sitemap. The sitemap is also ideal for laying out a site structure. You can set up the entire structure of the site and then create a graphic image of the sitemap. If you plan to develop dynamic pages, Dreamweaver needs the services of a testing server to generate and display dynamic content while you work. You'll find this under the site manage sites menu here in the manage sites dialog. Let's go ahead and edit one of my sites. And here in the site definition, notice that there's a category called testing server. This testing server can be your local computer, a development server, a staging server or a production server. Before you set up a testing server folder you must define a local and remote folder as I've done previously. You can often use the settings of your remote folder for your testing server because dynamic pages placed in the remote folder can normally be processed by an application server. So here in the testing server category set your server model, ASP Javascript, VBScript, ASP dot net, ColdFusion, JSP or PHP, MySQL as well as your access, FTP, local network or WebDAV. Most of your folder and file management work will be done here in the files window. So let me go ahead and move onto the next movie and review in more detail some of the tools and techniques you'll need to learn here in the files window.