Advanced Site Definition – An Overview - Page 6
July 24, 2002
| Whilst the
Site Definition Wizard is an extremely user-friendly way of defining
your site, it hides many of the configuration options available. This
is necessary so that the Wizard can provide a simplified and unified
approach to defining a site, but this isn't always enough. If you need
to change specific configuration options, or access other configuration
options not detailed in the Site Definition Wizard, then you need to
access the Advanced Site Definition. |
 |
The Advanced Site Definition can be accessed by clicking
on the Advanced tab, when opening
the Site Definition Wizard. The screenshot opposite displays the first category,
Local Info.
As you can see, from the column on the left of the screenshot, there are
a number of different categories. Some of these you will immediately recognize
as steps within the Site Definition Wizard, and others will be completely
new. Due to the nature of an Advanced Site Definition, it is impossible to
cater for every applicable configuration scenario, so for this reason we shall
work through each of these categories, and describe the options available
to you, allowing you to make a more informed choice.
Local
Info
The Local Info category is
for defining the settings and options that are applicable to the development
environment on the machine that you are using Dreamweaver on.
You will already be familiar with a number of the settings
here, as they are similar to their corresponding settings in the Site Definition
Wizard. However, other settings are new, and have not previously been covered.
Default Images Folder is one such setting. This allows you to specify a folder within your web
site that is dedicated to storing all the images that are used within it.
This is normally a good practice, as some web sites may use literally hundreds
of images in different places. Placing these images in a central directory
makes them easy to find and easy to manage. Dreamweaver has its own reasons
too for wanting to know where your images will be stored, as it can better
keep track of all your site's images and make them available within the Assets tab in the File panel. Dreamweaver also uses this information
to track links to your images, and uses this information whenever you insert
an image stored outside your web site's root folder, to determine where an
image must be copied to.
The other option, which you will probably be unfamiliar with, is Enable Cache. Cache technology is crucial in
the day-to-day working of the Internet. It speeds up connections around the
world, and gives users a better experience in general. A cache essentially
stores a local copy of the file in question, allowing it to be more quickly
accessed, and Dreamweaver's cache works in exactly the same way. By default
this option is checked, and when you are developing it works transparently,
allowing you to view pages more quickly. Whenever you add, amend, or delete
a file in the web site the cache is recreated so as to remain accurate and
consistent. It is usually a good idea to leave this option at its default
setting.
Remote Info
The Remote Info category is largely the same as
in the Site Definition Wizard, however there is one additional option here,
not covered in the Wizard.
Automatically upload files to server on save does exactly that; uploads your files to the
web server, whenever you save them. This is perfect if you're working one
a number of different web pages at the same time, so you can be sure that
you don't forget to upload on of the files. However, this option does require
that you have an active Internet connection if you connect to a remote server
via FTP.
Edit Directly On Remote Testing Server Using Local Network - Page 5
Dreamweaver MX: PHP Web Development
Testing Server - Page 7
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