Checking out and editing content

At this point you will not have any content in the Local Files area of your Dreamweaver CS4 interface because the content has not yet been checked out from the repository. To check out content make sure you are in the Local Files area of your website, right-click or Ctrl-click the Site folder at the top of your directory structure, and choose Version Control > Get Latest Versions (see Figure 7). This will synchronize your local directory structure with the content from the Subversion repository on the server. Now you have checked out the code and are ready to start making edits.

Figure 7. Choose Version Control > Get Latest Versions to retrieve content from Subversion.

Figure 8 shows the results of my check-out for voltmer.com. I am now ready to make a change to some of my content.

Figure 8. The updated local view.

Specifically, I have decided to update part of the index.html file on voltmer.com. I forgot to change the title of my main page from the defaults, and because I don't like what is there now I am going to make a change from:

<title>Title</title>

to:

<title>Voltmer's Website</title>

To make this change, I double-click the index.html file in the Local Files area to open it for editing. By default I see the Design view. At the top of the page I change the Title to "Voltmer's Website". Alternatively, I could have switched to Code view or Split view and made the edit directly in the HTML. Any of these actions will result in a change to the underlying file. After the change is made, I close the file and save the changes.

At this point my Local Files area changes slightly. Dreamweaver CS4 puts a check mark next to index.html indicating that I have made a change to the file (see Figure 9). This is a local change only; the files kept in the repository are unchanged. As far as the Subversion server is concerned the file has not yet been changed. Other users can check out their own copies of the site and make changes, but they won't see my modification to index.html.

I want to submit my changes back to the repository for eventual publication to the production website, so I need to check in (commit) my changes back to the repository.

Figure 9. The check mark next to index.html indicates a local change to the file.

To do this, I right-click on the changed file and choose Check In (see Figure 10). I am then prompted to provide a Commit Message. This message is stored along with the changes to the file in the repository as a record of the changes made to the file between check-out and check-in.

Figure 10. Choose Check In to commit a changed file to the repository.

Professional designers and developers know that clear, concise change descriptions are critical because they help everyone on the team understand what changes were made and why. You can even use the comments yourself to recall the details of one of your own past edits. For this change I type, "Changed the title of index.html" (see Figure 11).

Figure 11. Enter a meaningful description of the change for the Commit Message.

When I type in the dialog box I can click Commit and my changes are submitted (committed) to the repository. When you do this yourself, you will notice that Dreamweaver CS4 removes the check mark next to the file in the Local Files list to indicate that the file is no longer out of sync with the repository.

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