Dreamweaver is nutty

January 13, 2009 4:55 PM

Hello All, On a site I am building I have everything saved to a single file and all links are formated, /xxx.php but dreamweaver has started renaming everything file:/C|Documents%and%settings/administrator/desktop... ect. I am using PHP and using a testing server. no links work when I check it on my testing server. Everything has been working fine until today, and am unsure what may have caused the change. Thanks so much everyone.
posted by Benzle to computers & internet (5 comments total)

Ugh. Dreamweaver is not that good at managing links. Something probably happened where you mucked about with the defined document root, or changed whether your links are relative to the root or not. Who knows. Check your site setup to see if anything jumps out at you.

You can also try fixing your problem by doing a find-and-replace in DW (make sure you're searching the source code) to get rid of the extraneous crap before the slash, which will be the same everywhere it appears.

My advice for the future?
1) Do not use the check-in/check-out or get/put features of DW. Use a freestanding FTP program.
2) Always define a site in DW - don't just use it to edit random files.
3) Any time DW asks you if you want to "update links sitewide," be very afraid. Here lie unintended consequences.
posted by expialidocious at 5:22 PM on January 13

p.s. And if you do use DW's check-in etc. features, also be very careful if it asks you if you also want to upload/download dependent files.
posted by expialidocious at 5:23 PM on January 13

I have to say, your question is very very hard to understand.

> On a site I am building I have everything saved to a single file and all links are formated, /xxx.php but dreamweaver has started renaming everything file:/C|Documents%and%settings/administrator/desktop... ect.

I don't know what you mean by "everything saved to a single file", or "all links are formated" or that dreamweaver has started "renaming" things.

If you really had everything in a single file, you wouldn't need links, would you? Formatting's got nothing to do with the question that I can see, and Dreamweaver, for all its faults, doesn't actually rename your files.

Are you looking at your PHP files as files, not as part of a web server setup? Because if your browser is looking at a URL like file:///C:/foo/bar/a.php and that has a link to "b.php" then yes, implicitly that link is to file:///C:/foo/bar/b.php, your browser is correct. That doesn't mean that, in the source code, Dreamweaver has literally put that as the href part of the link.

Please explain in more detail. Give us an example, and also tell us how you're previewing your documents.
posted by AmbroseChapel at 5:53 PM on January 13

If you reference files in DW that are outside the site/document root, it will have to use the "file://etc." to find them. You can only use the relative links if the files you're linking to are in the same directory or in a directory below.

Check the actual location of the files you're wanting to reference because I suspect that they got moved or copied somewhere and DW updated the links. If the referenced PHP files are outside the server root for the testing server, then they will behave like text files since they're coming from the Windows Explorer rather than the web server.

In order for the above to happen, you'd have to have the automatic link updating on. You can check this in Edit > Preferences > General > Document options > [Update links when moving]
posted by camcgee at 3:14 PM on January 14

Thanks everyone
posted by Benzle at 12:16 PM on February 11