Design Center Tutorial
Organizing a local site in Dreamweaver
Table of Contents
Organizing your Dreamweaver site
The theme of this technique is as essential as it is simple: Never change filenames or move files between folders using your operating system’s file management tools. Instead, always rely on Dreamweaver’s Files panel to manage filenames and to move files between folders. The Site folder looks and works like the Finder (for Mac) or Explorer (for Windows) utilities. It allows you to drag files between folders, copy and paste files, rename files, and delete files, just as you would do in Finder or Explorer.
Why should you use Dreamweaver’s Files panel? Because in a website, files are almost always connected to other files. You might have an image embedded in a page. If you change the name of that image file or move it to another folder, the link between that image and the page in which it is embedded becomes corrupted.
However, if you do all your file management in Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver will fix the problems caused by moving or renaming a file by redefining links that involve that file. For instance, if files in your website contain links to a file and that filename is changed, Dreamweaver will prompt you to change those links in an Update Files dialog (Figure 2).
Figure 2: Dreamweaver redefining links to match a changed filename.
When you define your local website in Dreamweaver, you define a local site folder. Dreamweaver knows that this folder is where all your site files should be kept. If you open a file from another folder or embed a file from another folder, Dreamweaver will prompt you to save a copy of that file in your Web folder. For example, if you embed an image in a Web page, Dreamweaver will prompt you to save that image to your site file when you place it on the page.
Where to go from here
For more information about Dreamweaver CS3, check out the following resources:
- Dreamweaver Design Center
- Collecting content for a Dreamweaver site, by David Karlins
- Defining a local Dreamweaver site, by David Karlins
