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Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 Tutorials

Site Setup / Working with Remote & Local Files

Subtitles of the Movie

Let me now say a few words to help you understand the difference between the local and the remote folder structures that you'll be working with in Dreamweaver CS4. When you want to use Dreamweaver to connect to a remote folder or a remote host, you specify the remote folder in the remote info category here in the Site Definition dialogue box, this is the definition that you'll use to create a new site. The remote folder that you specify, also referred to as the host directory should correspond to the local root folder of your Dreamweaver site so notice that if I go to remote info my access is probably going to be FTP although you could set up local and remote on a local network. Once you have accessed FTP you need to get the FTP host information, the login and the password information from your host provider and then click on Test to make sure that that information is correct. The key however is this local info must match the remote info and usually those files will be the same for example if I go to my Geek Manual site and click on Edit you can see that I've filled in the remote info from my host earthlink. And now if I open up the Files Manager, let's go ahead and stop that, it's setting up a cache there, it's caching up that site for me, and now once it's done I get this local side only but if I click on this icon, it's a little bit esoteric and a little bit hidden, a lot of my students have trouble the first few times that they set up a site, but there's a little icon there that will allow you to see both your local and your remote site. So the important thing is that these two should generally match when you first establish the remote connection by clicking on this connect to remote host icon, the remote folder on the web server is usually empty, then when you use to upload the files from your local root folder to the remote folder this will populate it with all of your web files, I've already done this, the point I'm making here is that the directory structure of the remote folder and the local folder should always be exactly the same. If the structure of the remote folder which in this case is not exactly the same as my local structure Dreamweaver may upload files to the wrong place or they may not be visible to your site visitors. Additionally, image and link paths can easily break when folder and file structures here are not in sync. If you plan to develop dynamic pages Dreamweaver will need the services of a testing server to generate and display dynamic content while you work, the testing server can be your local computer, a development server, a staging server, or a production server, you'll set that up here in the site definition for that site in the testing server category, before you do set up your testing server you'll need to define a local folder by filling out the local info as well as the remote info here in the remote info category. The next one then is the testing server so you want to go in order, 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. Open up this site definition dialogue remember by choosing sites, let's go ahead and close out of here and stop that. But choose Site, New Site and that will bring you to this site definition dialogue where you then go ahead and set up your local and remote info and there's your testing server category. First select the server technology you want to use for your web application, including ASP, Javascript, ASP VBScript, .NET, ColdFusion, JSP, PHP MySQL, then choose your access settings, FTP, local network, or webDAV. By default, Dreamweaver assumes an application server is running on the same system as your web server, if you defined a remote folder in the remote info category in the site definition dialogue box there and if an application server runs on the same system as a remote folder including your local computer accept the default settings in the testing server category. See the Dreamweaver Help section for more details about setting up the testing server.

Tutorial Information

Course: Adobe Dreamweaver CS4
Author: James Gonzalez
SKU: 33968
ISBN: 1-935320-30-0
Release Date: 2009-02-13
Duration: 9.5 hrs / 104 lessons
Work Files: Yes
Captions: Available on CD and Online University
Compatibility: Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux
QuickTime 7, Flash 8

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