Newbie: 3 Questions

[TechStop? webforumsuser@macromedia.com]

After years of hand-coding, I purchased Dreamweaver MX.

I have an existing site with loads of .php pages and MovableType (which uses perl) used to run the site.

Question 1: Is it possible to bring this into Dreamweaver MX? I'd like to develop new pages using the graphical interface.

Question 2: An attempt at defining a site and then downloading all the files brought pages from remote to local, but style sheets are not linked and images show up "broken". Is this because I'm setting things up wrongly to get this into DMX?

Question 3: Is it possible to develop .php pages on my laptop (where I have installed DMX), see how they would really look, and then upload them to the already existing site mentioned in the first two questions?

If anyone needs to view the existing site to see what I'm after, it's at [url]www.TechStop.com[/url]. The site is currently powered by MovableType plus some pages I hand-coded plus an Invision bulletin board install which runs on php. Most of my pages are .php pages.

Thanks!

-- Rick

[TechStop? webforumsuser@macromedia.com]

Thanks. I'm assuming from what you said there might be two potential fixes to the URL issue:

Instead of nesting, put everything in (say) c:\TechStop and go from there? or
Use some other way of referencing URLs.

I'll experiment on that one.

Meanwhile, anyone know where to get a PHP server that runs on a laptop?

Either way, thanks for responding!

[Joe Makowiec]

On Thu 24 Jul 2003 04:37:45p, wrote in macromedia.dreamweaver:

> Meanwhile, anyone know where to get a PHP server that runs on a laptop?

[url]http://www.php.net/downloads.php[/url] ?

[TechStop? webforumsuser@macromedia.com]

I think part of the problem may be a misunderstanding on my part about what I'm supposed to see.

I've done networking a long time. I've created web sites/pages for a long time by hand-coding. Never used Dreamweaver until I played with someone else's copy of version 4 to make [url]www.bestdtp.org[/url]. I liked it enough that I bought MX, but I haven't used it yet (I've had many abortive attempts, but seem to be too stupid to figure it out).

I managed to install PHP. Must be working, because if I do a test (which I've tried to attach here) of php code, it works.

I've defined the site as follows:

local
c:\TechStop

remote
set up as ftp accessible with the correct machine and public_html as the host directory;
connection tests fine

testing
set for local/network
testing server folder is C:\Inetpub\wwwroot\TechStop\
URL prefix is [url]http://localhost[/url]

I figured out why my images were showing up "broken". It's because some of them were apparently put in (I don't recall WHY I did this) with full URLs (e.g., http:/www.techstop.com/path/to/image). If I change these to simply /path/to/image it works.

BUT I still get all these yellow things showing up in my display in DMX. Some look like they have anchors on them, some like chevrons, some with exclamation points, etc.

If I hit F12, I see the page showing up just the way it's supposed to look, with a URL similar to this: [url]http://localhost/TMP2d7x7ijzv6.php[/url]

But in the display, I see these yellow things. Also, there is no style-sheet applied (but there is supposed to be, and it's obviously applied if I hit F12)---on the CSS Styles tab, the only thing in the box says "No CSS Style". And (this is more evidence of the style sheet oddity) the document doesn't have it's side column text on the side in the DMX view, but with F12, it shows up on the side where it should be because of the style sheet definitions. I was hoping when I pulled the existing site into DMX using "get" that it would know to show the style sheets applied (after all, the style sheet directives are in the files!).

I'm thinking this is going to make it tough to tweak these pages in DMX. Perhaps I'll be able to create other pages. Then as long as I never want to tweak any of the existing pages (except by hand or in MovableType---which is the same, practically, as saying "by hand"), then I'll be okay.

Finally, if I click "Live Data View", I get a message that says, "The testing server did not execute any of the scripts in your document" and gives all the reasons. The one that probably fits is that there is no script in the document. So none of the yellow things showing up in the view are scripts. (I inserted the test code which I hopefully have attached into that document and clicked "Live Data View" and didn't get the error; instead it showed what you'd expect if the script properly executed.)

So part of what I think is going on here is that I'm probably trying to learn too many things at once. ;) I'm trying to bring a site created with MovableType (because I need the blog capabilities) into DMX when I barely understand how MovableType works (although I can use it). I set up IIS on this laptop (because I thought apache and php were failing---now I believe they were fine and I may go back to them). And I know next-to-squat about PHP. I was always a perl user before. But it seems the Invision bulletin board I want to use and MovableType both can work with PHP. And since supposedly DMX can use PHP...and MySQL (which I'm also just learning, by the way, having always done perl and created my own text-file-based databases with delimiters), I thought I'd go with PHP and try to learn it.

Probably just trying to learn too much at one time.

I mean, heck, I have a full three or four weeks before I start my second year of law school, so why not, eh? ;)
<p>This page was created at <b>
<?php echo date("h:i:s a", time()); ?>
</b> on the computer running PHP.</p>

[Michael Fesser]

TechStop? webforumsuser wrote:

>I managed to install PHP. Must be working, because if I do a test
>(which I've tried to attach here) of php code, it works.

The best way to check that PHP works properly is to call the phpinfo()
function:

<?php
phpinfo();
?>

returns informations about PHP, the current config, loaded extensions
and environment variables.

Micha