Ask MetaFilter posts tagged with dreamweaver

Why won't CSS rollovers work for me?

reductiondesign — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 15:16:01 -0800

I'm trying to put CSS rollover buttons onto my website. They show up just fine in Dreamweaver, but not on any browser. This makes no sense, about to go insane, more inside, etc. Alright, I hope someone here can help me.

I'm trying to put some CSS rollover buttons on a page, as so . . .

[MeFi is stripping out my HTML code, but it's basically a link--a href--with a class tag (="artisticroll") and some style for positioning.]
Note: I'm positive that there's not an error in this code.

. . . and this links back to my .css file, part of which is thus . . .

a.artisticroll
{
display: block;
width: 200px;
height: 23px;
background-image: url('artisticROLL.jpg');
}
a.artisticroll:hover
{
background-position: 0 23px;
}

. . . but it only shows up in Dreamweaver--not in any browsers. I've tried doing a local preview as well as actually uploading all the files onto my host and viewing it online. Nothing works.

This isn't the weird part. What's stranger is that I have other CSS rollover buttons on the same page that work just fine.

Code / .css except for working buttons:

[Same issue/code as above, except the class is "contactroll".]

a.contactroll
{
display: block;
width: 130px;
height: 60px;
background-image: url('contactROLL.jpg');
}
a.contactroll:hover
{
background-position: 0 60px;
}

As far as I can tell, there is absolutely no reason for some buttons to work and some not. What am I doing wrong?

Thanks for any/all help; I can provide more details if needed.

Just like the neighbor's cat in your kids' sandbox...

bonobo — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 19:06:04 -0800

What am I doing to my links pointing to images in a private directory that prevents me from seeing the pics in Dreamweaver CS3 Design mode? Searching Adobe's Knowlegebase and Google yields a flood of others' issues with setting up passworded sites or Dreamweaver forgetting FTP login info and I can't narrow the results to the problem I'm having.

I just started building a web site and I'm rusty in HTML and am learning CSS. After I edit the code, I do like to check it out in Design view. Currently, I'm uploading things to a private directory (passworded .htaccess on a Zeus server not managed by me) so my business partner can see pages before the site goes "live." Viewing the site through a browser, one is prompted to enter the name and password to see this directory's content. No problems there. I have no troubles with file management in DW's FTP prog or in FileZilla, either.

Suppose the page I'm working on is located at http://www.[mydumbsite].com/public_html/sandbox/mydumbpage.htm . "Sandbox" is the passworded directory. My stylesheet for CSS is located in the same directory and the page refers directly to mydumbstylesheet.css . The pics reside below "sandbox" in folders "dumbimages" and "dumbimages/dumbthumbs." The stylesheet's effects on my .html pages show up in Design mode. The images do not. When it's all said and done, the images ARE there on the site and appear in the final product. I would just like to know what I'm doing or not doing that keeps me from being able to preview.

How do I refer to the image locations the short way (vs. "http://www.[mydumbsite].com/public_html/sandbox/images/dumbpic.jpg") so DW is not blocked access? Or Is there a way to tell DW to prompt me to get into pw'd dirs in preview mode?

Any other methods/advice (other than "OMG don't use THAT program, I write code with Sith blood on tree bark") are welcome.

Thanks!

Should I bother learning Dreamweaver CS3?

camcgee — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 14:32:29 -0800

What workflow advantages have you found with Dreamweaver CS3? I got the Design Premium version of Adobe CS3 a while ago and in addition to the programs that I actually know and use (i.e. InDesign, Photoshop, Acrobat Pro, and Illustrator), I have been wondering whether Dreamweaver CS3 might offer some advantage over my current web workflow.

Currently, I generally do mock-ups in Photoshop then create the site code (HTML/CSS/PHP/JS) using EditPad Pro. I test sites on a dev server running on my local machine and then upload files to the actual servers using FileZilla, since I'm not fond of EPP's built-in FTP functionality.

Has anyone migrated from a similar setup to using Dreamweaver and found real advantages in time saved or ease of use?

My first impression of DW was that it seemed bloated with stuff I don't need and won't use, though I realize that's partly because I'm just not used to using anything other than a text editor.

I'm curious about integrating it with my Photoshop mock-ups as wells as replacing the need for a separate FTP program to actually transfer and manage the files.

I have no interest in the WYSIWYG editor or any of the prefab layouts. The code completion felt intrusive but I wonder if I should just be patient and once I get used to it, I will learn to appreciate it. I'm also wondering about other things that DW can do -- error checking, browser compatibility testing, etc. that might make it more useful as far as consolidating my tools.

One other potential issue is that I'm about to start working on some Perl-centric sites, for which DW doesn't seem to have much in the way of advantages -- syntax highlighting, code completion, etc.

Dreamweaver/coding help

Sophie1 — Wed, 23 Apr 2008 09:26:41 -0800

Dreamweaver filter - I have just set up a site using Dreamweaver and i am getting one piece of the code in the finished site. HELP!!! I'm a total noob at coding. Clearly. Here is the code. The text on the finished site (in Firefox but not when I preview) is "line decor" (without the quotes). What am I missing!!!!??? FYI - in order to have this text in here, I deleted the end >

file:///I|/CAREWebsite/pdf/mm_dashed_line.gif"><img src="file:///I|/CAREWebsite/pdf/mm_dashed_line.gif" alt="line decor" width="4" height="3" border="0" /

You can see it at the website here

I'm a researcher Jim, not a designer!

Create websites from the comfort of your own home!

clh — Wed, 13 Feb 2008 17:07:12 -0800

What's the best way to learn Dreamweaver at home? I am a graphic designer working mostly with print, but obviously am a little behind the times. I want to learn Dreamweaver. My immediate goal is to do single html pages (e-newsletters etc.), rather than whole websites.

How? I am looking for specific tutorial book recommendations, or online tutorials, or whatever. How did you learn Dreamweaver? Why did or did you not think that method was great?

Dreamhacker

ReiToei — Thu, 31 Jan 2008 04:30:51 -0800

I would like to write my own HTML/CSS editor. What would be the best way to go about it? (more inside) I've been a professional web developer for the last 8 years or so. I've used Dreamweaver all the way back since the very first beta came out way back when. Without a doubt, it's the best tool for the job (for me).

Saying that, I only ever use Dreamweaver to write code. I don't use any of the visual tools, or any of the built in javascript or back end helper code. I'd say I maybe use 15% of all it's features. It got quite bloated over the years, but it's that 15% that's keeping me from ditching in altogether and going with something like Komodo edit or one of the other open source tools like Bluefish or Aptana.

These features are:

1. The awesome tab completion and code hinting for HTML/CSS
2. Code coloring
3. Color pickers when defining colors on the fly
4. File picker when defining background image files on the fly
5. Code formatting/indentation

My question is, how hard would it be to write my own standalone editor that could do these things, or could I extend another existing software package (like Eclipse) to do it? I would like to make something that would be cross-platform and free.

Apologies for the long-winded post. I throw myself at your feet, hive mind!

Why won't Dreamweaver let me check out (or save) files?

unsigned — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 15:11:41 -0800

Why won't Dreamweaver let me check out (or save) files? Background and possibly relevant information:

- I had been using DW8 on a Windows machine, then upgraded to CS3 when I got my new Mac.
- My local site is set up on a network drive.
- If I double click to open and check out the file, DW asks if I want to overwrite my local copy. This is the first strange thing, as it usually doesn't ask this. If I hit yes, it opens, but I think as read only (is not checked out). If I hit no, it checks it out but when I make changes and try to save it, it gives me the "access to [file path] was denied".
- If I select just check out (w/out open) it says "[file] - error occurred - Check Out failed since [file] does not exist on the remote site." (But it does exist!)
- If I open a file that was checked out through DW8 (shows up as checked out in CS3) and edit it, I AM able to save that and upload and check-in/out, etc. Although, I get a "The file has been modified outside of DW. Do you want to reload it?" Which always makes me nervous, since afaik, it shouldn't do that.
- I have to use check-in/out feature

I think that's it. Thank you!

How do you set up pub key auth for Dreamweaver's sftp client on a windows box?

jj27 — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 09:27:28 -0800

How do you set up pub key auth for Dreamweaver's sftp client on a windows box? I have clients who want to connect to a unix webserver, that is running openssh, from Dreamweaver's sftp client on a windows box using only public key authentication. Is this possible using Dreamweaver's internal sftp client?

Help me find a website (non CMS/Blog) program/tool for my wife.

Leenie — Sat, 29 Dec 2007 01:31:15 -0800

My wife and I have a small family farm. While I run a few websites that are hand coded, Wordpress or Joomla based, with galleries and more, she can not handle that. We are trying to find a simple website creation program for her to maintain the farms website.

The one we are testing and it almost what we need is 'Website Baker'. It is a PHP web application that is somewhat WYSIWYG. The big gripe we have is image handling. If we have a large photo from a camera and want to place it on the website, it can not create thumbnails or a browser friendly size. You have to upload the images before you can use them on the page, etc. You can not have images float on the page to the right or left of the page, they have to be within a paragraph break.

We don't need commenting, blogging, ratings, voting or anything like that. We are looking for software that will let her create the website, a professional non crap looking page. I can do the templating, that is not the problem.

The software needs to be able to create a static page for an animal. That page will contain its recent genetics along with a few paragraphs about the animal. Photographs are required on the pages.

If the menu system can support sub pages/categories, that is great.
Example:
Breed 1
Animal 1
Animal 2
Animal 3
Breed 2
Animal 1
Animal 2

Nvu, Frontpage, Dreamweaver, etc. are not an option. Web based apps get bonus points. It will be on a Linux server running Apache web server with MySQL and all of the usual stuff.

Thanks for any, and I mean any, suggestions.

Dreamweaver Site Deifinition problem

orlin — Wed, 26 Dec 2007 20:42:47 -0800

When in Dreamweaver 8 setting up the "site definitions / advanced/ remote info - I enter my login-in an password information and when I exit DW, it erases the information. Note that I've check the save password box. I can't get DW to save my Login and Password. How can I get it to save it? Thanks in advance for your help...

This is why I don't like maintaining other people's webpages

BackwardsCity — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 06:38:21 -0800

I didn't design this page, but I'm now maintaining it. Why does the shaded gray box on the right appear halfway down the page in IE, but right where it should in Firefox? I think it was designed in Dreamweaver, but I'm not sure. How can I fix this?

How much do Dreamweaver and Contribute integrate?

unsigned — Tue, 31 Jul 2007 12:10:47 -0800

Is it possible to preview drafts sent via Contribute in Dreamweaver? I don't mean publishing the draft in Contribute then checking it out again in Dreamweaver. I need to edit the drafts in Dreamweaver without publishing them. Possible?

Working with Dreamweaver Design View and CSS

100watts — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 13:37:58 -0800

How do I, using Dreamweaver 8 on a PC, "see" the css in "design view"? As of this morning, I was able to "see" the css effecting the layout and design of pages in Dreamweaver's design view. The stylesheet was external. My coworker was not able to see this on her computer. We tested several options: relative URL to stylesheet on same site/drive, absolute URL to stylesheet on the drive we have access to, and absolute URL to stylesheet on a completely unrelated website. In my DW, I could "see" the page properly in all those configurations. She could not.

In clicking around DW to find out what setting I had enabled/disabled that was different from hers, I somehow managed to change MY computer so that now it doesn't work either.

We're about to have to train approximately 30 other coworkers as to how to properly set their DW to see the stylesheet and I can't believe that instead of fixing my coworker's machine, I "broke" mine.

I've searched Google and AskMeFi and everything tells me how to set up an external stylesheet, not how to see its characteristics when using design view.

Will gladly post screenshots if necessary and am willing to give out IM contact info if anyone wants to help in real time - just email me.

Thanks.

dreamweaver not so dreamy

hazel — Wed, 30 May 2007 12:22:43 -0800

Dreamweaver question... I want some of the links on a page to be one color, and the rest of the links be a different color. Setting the link colors in page properties makes ALL links the same color. Is there a way to make links of different colors? Maybe by over-riding the page properties in a specific section of the page? Or separating the page props some how? thanks... novice

How and how much to transfer to a new platform?

clairezulkey — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 11:23:44 -0800

I've been running my blog for many years now and it's come to my attention that I'm dead without an RSS feed. I've used Dreamweaver to design and edit the site all these years and have tried to figure out ways to incorporate an RSS feed when I update, but I haven't found an easy way to do that thus far (XO is my host.) I may be wrong but I think I need to just transfer the whole thing to a new platform like Moveable Type or something like that--is it just easiest to hire someone to do this for me? How would I go about this and how much would it cost? Or are there better ways to do this? Help!

Open source software for design company

spinko — Fri, 13 Apr 2007 03:50:28 -0800

Open source software for a professional web design company. Design filter.

I've been running my company for nearly 2 years now and is now concerned paying the premium for software for my staff.

I've already converted the office in to using OpenOffice which works brilliantly.

What Im looking for is opensource / paid software (reasonable cost) that is similar to:

1) Dreamweaver (doesnt matter if there are 2 separate sofware for CSS and xHTML)
2) Photoshop (I know Gimp is there any better?)
3) Flash
4) Quark Xpress

I cant live without Adobe Fireworks and is willing to pay for that. Its just when you look at the full package (all software) per staff its roughly £1500 / $3000.

Move mouse and panic

adamvasco — Wed, 11 Apr 2007 08:09:09 -0800

"How to" write a web page. Easy advice for a n00b. So I've bitten the bullet and borrowed an old copy of Dreamweaver Ultradev 4. What do I do now? I've searched, believe me I've searched and anywhere I search mentioning Dreamweaver takes me to books or pay tutorials. And anywhere I don't takes me to HTML, CSS Pearl,Ruby, Java whatever.
This place is full of helpful web savvy creators. Please point me to where to get started; hopefully to produce something not too revolting. Flash is not my friend. Out there somewhere is "A morans guide to web pages sub 101... How to for Idiots."

Help me help people send newsletters

bristolcat — Fri, 23 Mar 2007 08:03:45 -0800

What is a good program for sending a corporate newsletter to clients and sales reps? I need a program that's easy-to-use, free or cheap and yields professional results. High expectations, I know, but here is my story.

My company currently has a program called MailThem Pro. This works fine, but the catch is you basically have to embed a html file into the e-mail. This means building a website to serve as the newsletter. This in turn means that I have to train every person who does it how to use Dreamweaver and html skills. I feel there must be an easier, faster way to do this.

The person who manages the newsletter is new to the company and doesn't know anything about websites. The employees who managed it before used Dreamweaver, but as the turnover rate in that particular position is quite high, I've had to train about three people to use Dreamweaver in the last few years. They never totally understood it and I always felt that our newsletter looked poor and unprofessional. And now I'm faced with either training this person Dreamweaver (version 4) or finding a new solution. Another catch: I'm physically leaving the company to telecommute come next week.

The newsletter is a simple templated e-mail with a bar running down the left side which contains email addresses, dates and other small items. The content area contains news updates. It has a circulation of about 300.

What's the best solution for me? I searched the archives and there are some posts, but from at least two years ago. There might be something better out there now, hopefully. Please help! Thanks!

Stop Dreamweavers Contributions to Contribute

Xurando — Sun, 11 Mar 2007 18:25:43 -0800

Help me figure out how to rescue my business website from the clutches of the evil Dreamweaver? For years my web site and I coexisted in FrontPage. I was able to do what I needed including forms, etc. About three years ago my site got bigger and I switched to a Mac for the home office computer. At that point I hired a web designer who redid the entire site in Dreamweaver. For 2 years I used Contribute to edit the site and add content.

About a year ago the designer moved away and took Dreamweaver with her. Now my site needs a serious redesign, I have a low budget and would love to continue using Contribute. The problem is the master template regions in Contribute are locked and I can't change them without dreamweaver nor can I reformat my forms.

Using Dreamweaver to redo my site would be costly, have a steep learning curve, and would seem to defeat the reason for using Contribute in the first place, i.e, keep it simple.

I have to make some changes very soon and am desperate for a workable solution that I can do myself.

My hard drive's about to die, isn't it?

jroybal — Thu, 08 Mar 2007 11:13:52 -0800

A Google and AskMe search leads me to believe that my laptop's hard drive is about to fail. (Files missing, slow access, system running warmly). Yay or nay? Is it the software or the system? Dell Inspiron 6000
Windows XP Home
1.25 GB ram
Purchased in June 2005
Mostly used for iTunes, internet, Word, Excel, Dreamweaver

The computer itself seems to be running warmer than usual, if that has anything to do with it.

A virus scan takes *forever*. ZoneAlarm's virus scanner has been running for 1 hour and 30 minutes and has covered ~100,000 files. It's never taken that long.

iTunes has been acting up a lot (v7.0.whatever and the new 7.1.whatever that came out this week). I don't think these are iTunes problems as I've never encountered anything like these issues, and I've been using iTunes since the day it was released for Windows (literally).
-I'll add music to my library and close iTunes, but it won't be there when I return to iTunes later.
-Albums I've had in my library for months go missing from both the iTunes library and the hard drive.
-Gobs of tags are being corrupted: something like ~750 songs in a 25 GB library no longer have some combination of album/artist/track info.
-File are being renamed: "1 Space Oddity.mp3" becomes "1 1 1 Space Oddity.mp3"
-Play counts aren't being recorded: I'll listen to music for an hour or so (straight through albums, without skipping tracks), but then later, the Recently Played smart playlist will only show music that I listened to days ago.
-iTunes forgets where to look for random songs, so many tracks have a little exclamation point next to it and I have to redirect the program to the file, even though I didn't change anything or move the file.
-I renamed the soundtrack "West Side Story" to "West Side Story: Original Motion Picture Soundtrack." Instead of just renaming the album with the new title, iTunes added a new instance of the album, so instead of having just one set of tracks from the album, there are now 2 copies of each song, one with the old album title and one with the new title; it follows that the set with the old title has exclamation points because the folder was also properly renamed.

My Dreamweaver sites in Dreamweaver itself are MIA. I was working on my two sites last night, and everything seemed fine. Revisiting them today, though, the sites no longer appear in the Manage Sites window, as if the program was just installed. They were there last night, and much longer before that. The content from the sites, though, still exists in My Documents.

I just reformatted the hard drive in December and started from scratch, but things aren't humming along smoothly as it usually does when I do that. Am I headed towards a hard drive failure? If so, how long could it be?

I'm backing things up as I write this, everything to an external hard drive and my important docs again to my thumb drive.

Hope this was clear and articulate. Thanks in advance for your help!

Deamweaver "Site Definition" question

orlin — Fri, 09 Feb 2007 14:25:52 -0800

Help, Help !! If anyone has experience with Dreamweaver and setting up the “Site Definition” settings; either basic or advanced mode for “Remote Info” I desperately need your advice and it would be very much appreciated. Runbox is my web host and I use “cPannel” to manage my web files. I can’t figure out what settings to use for “FTP access”. What would my “FTP host” be and what should I put in there this field? To be honest, I’m not quite sure what a FTP is although to use Dreamweaver’s functions, I need to set this up and have not been successful. Next question; Am I correct in saying the “Host Directory” would be in the “public_html” folder in cPannel that all my web page files are located? Any advice would be appreciated. I’ve tried multiple times and days to set this up, but I must be doing something wrong. Thank you in advance for your cooperation…Orlin

Search and Replace across entire website

niles — Thu, 25 Jan 2007 10:20:11 -0800

I need to do a massive replace of Flash object HTML code throughout an entire site. I really don't want to download each page and fix it by hand. I have the task of fixing the "Eolas bug" in a small-to-medium sized web site. The fix involves replacing every single instance of 6 lines of embed/object code with the SWFObject code. I do other site changes in Dreamweaver 8, but I don't think it's up to doing a search and replace in 50 to 100 pages (at least not without downloading and reuploading every page).

I have SSH access to the server, so I believe I can do some sort of regex replace magic - but I only know enough to be dangerous. Any instructions for replacing HTML code, only in .html files, with other specific code via regular expressions? If there's a better way to do this, Id love to hear that too.

I really, really don't need this to turn into a "oh, regular expressions really do need the brackets escaped" experience.

How to set up an RSS feed for my old-fashioned site?

clairezulkey — Thu, 07 Dec 2006 09:01:10 -0800

How to set up an RSS feed for my old-fashioned site? Please know that I only sort of know what I"m talking about in this post, so if my verbiage is off, don't hurt me.

Everyone is telling me that I need an RSS feed in order for my blog to keep up with readers and aggregators and whatnot. I wish I could just ignore the whole thing, especially considering the PITA that this is turning out to be.

I started my site in 2002--it was designed and edited via Dreamweaver, and my host is XO.com (the site is Zulkey.com.) My boyfriend tried to help me get an RSS set up by getting me on Dreamweaver 3, which apparently has RSS capabilites, but the problem is my four years' worth of archives.

I can go without setting up a feed for my old stuff, but I still have no idea how to do it currentl. It probably doesn't help that my site is text-driven and has one long post a day as opposed to several smaller ones.

Is there any way to set up a feed for this puppy that's not going to cause tremendous amounts of time? Would it be best to just transfer the whole thing to a new platform like Moveable Type? And if so, how can that be done? I wish I could just throw some money at the problem and buy some magical program that takes care of this for me in a relatively simple way.

If you want to tell me not to worry about it, that not having an RSS feed isn't hurting me tremendously in the long run, then I'll listen to that as well.

Thanks for reading this damn-long post.

Best Free Programs for a Mac?

randomthoughts — Thu, 16 Nov 2006 08:31:19 -0800

What Mac applications would make me love a Mac? For the last year or so I have been using a Apple PowerBook G4 with the lastest OS X version but the problem is I don't have any non-standard software for it. So basically it is a Internet surfing and e-mail expensive toy.

On a PC I typically use Dreamweaver MX for web design and FTP and Photoshop CS for photo editing. Occassionally I use video editing software but my MiniDV camera is not compatible with my PowerBook. I also use Microsoft Power Point and Word for work purposes.

What are some programs that are FREE that would allow me the same type of programs on a Mac? Besides a WYSIWYG, Office Application and Photo Editing software what are some cool programs to use on a Mac? I am a techie yet new to the Mac world, and can't afford Dreamweaver and Photoshop for my Mac.

Making Me Some Templates

Foam Pants — Mon, 21 Aug 2006 16:50:02 -0800

Just how does a Dreamweaver template work? So, I have done server-side includes before but now I am tasked with making a Dreamweaver template. I have made a template but, when I look at the code, all I see are some comments. How the heck does Dreamweaver update everything made with said template when said template is changed? Does it just know how to find these pages? What if I make an edit to the code on one of the clones outside of Dreamweaver? What happens if some schmoe takes one of the template-made pages into Frontpage and starts messin' with the areas I don't want them to? How many questions can I ask all at once? The answer: many!