Subtitles of the Movie

Most of your file and folder work will be done here in the files window, so let me devote this entire movie to some tools and techniques you're going to need to learn in order to efficiently work with your Dreamweaver sites. Up here at the top of the files window are a series of interface buttons starting with the connection button. Click on this connect button to connect to your remote host once you've set up your local site and established your remote server. Now one of the most important things that you'll want to do here in the files window is change file names or change file locations. Notice for example, if I take my index page and I change the name from index dot HTM to index dot HTML, Dreamweaver will warn me that I have links in the following files, index dot HTML. It will update for me. In almost all cases you'll want to definitely update, have Dreamweaver update those links for you to make sure that you don't have any broken links based on that file name being changed. I'm going to go ahead and update that back. We've also got the ability because of a site cache that Dreamweaver will create once you originally create your local site here. The site cache is a list of all the links and all the files in your site root. So notice that if I change the location of one of these files, it'll also want to update any links that need to be changed so that those files don't go missing. In that case I moved a file misc three from the Flash folder out into the root folder. Let me go ahead and move that back and notice that Dreamweaver will maintain those links for you. The key is to remember to always change filenames and file locations using the files window here. Never do this in your operating system in either the Mac operating system or Windows file manager because then Dreamweaver wont update the links for you. But if you do those kinds of changes here in the files window then everything should stay current and linked up and you shouldn't run into any problems. The other tools here along the top of the interface are useful starting with the refresh button. You'll want to refresh your site when you make any changes. That'll refresh either the local site or the remote site. You've also got a FTP log if you've been using the FTP client in Dreamweaver. This will give you a complete log of the activity of the FTP client in terms of what files have been uploaded and downloaded and the success or failure of those operations. We've also got site file view, testing server view or sitemap view, map only or map and files. Let's go ahead and connect back to my remote host using the connect icon. These two tools are very useful. Get files and put files. How these work is you select a folder or file to put files up on the remote server. Click on the put files icon. To get files from the remote server click on the get files icon. Be careful when using these two buttons in that the folder structure must be identical across both the remote site and local files here in order for these to work flawlessly and efficiently. Often times my local files has a different folder structure. I might have some additional folders here. So in those cases I like to move my files from the local to the remote by clicking and dragging and dropping them directly to the location where I want them over there on the remote site. But the get and put buttons are quite convenient. Check out files if you're using the check out system, you're using a site with more than one developer or designer, check in and check out. You've also got a synchronized button that will synchronize the file so that they're both the same on the remote site and the local site. I'll be covering this towards the end of this tutorial. But basically Dreamweaver will check to see which file is older whether the local file or the remote file and then update it accordingly so that you get the most recent files on either side. Dreamweaver will then prompt you and ask if you do want to remove that older file with a newer file. This icon here is collapsed to show only local or remote. It's very handy. And when you either in local or remote you've also got an expand to show local and remote views. I typically like this view better because then I can keep an eye on what's going on both with my remote site and with my local files. Let me now move onto the next movie and give you the folder and file management tips that I think you'll need to master, to maintain your sanity while working with Dreamweaver sites especially those first few sites that I find that most of my students have a lot of trouble with these concepts of managing folders and files and sites in Dreamweaver. So in the next movie let me give you some tips and techniques for really avoiding a lot of the problems that you'll encounter later if you don't have sound, folder and file management practices.