Help: editing an existing website

[zachthezilla]

Hey guys,

So I'm trying to edit an existing website bahiadelsolnica.com. I've read an online tutorial which showed me how to copy the files from the remote site to my local hard hard drive using filezilla. After doing this however and attempting to open the php files in dreamweaver cs4 everything was scrambled in the display view and almost all the pictures showed up as error boxes. If anyone has any helpful suggestions they would be much appreciated as I think I'm going to drive myself crazy trying to get this thing to work!

zachthezilla

 

[ronaldroe]

Sounds like you either didn't copy some files or references to those files are incorrect.

 

[zachthezilla]

Hey thanks for getting back so quick Ronald. I think you may be right about the references, I made sure to copy all of the files in public html file (would there be others I need, the tutorial I read said I only needed these ones). How would I go about checking the references and why would they be incorrect if the site is working properly on the remote server.

 

[Big Secz]

To my knowledge you can't view php in design view from your local hard drive in Dreamweaver. Php is sever side scripting and and does not work in WYSIWYG editors. You would have to link Dreamweaver to the server and edit the files in code view on the server and then view the modifications from a browser.

 

[CaldwellYSR]

To my knowledge you can't view php in design view from your local hard drive in Dreamweaver. Php is sever side scripting and and does not work in WYSIWYG editors. You would have to link Dreamweaver to the server and edit the files in code view on the server and then view the modifications from a browser.

Yes I second this

 

[zachthezilla]

Alright sweet, but does that mean that I can't edit and test without effecting the existing website? I'm still kind of green and don't want to mess anything up!

 

[eProHosted]

You can learn about php at php.net...

It is best to learn a programming code such as html or php so you can directly edit your code with an understanding of it. It is much easier than using something like dreamweaver once you get the hang of it.

 

[CaldwellYSR]

Alright sweet, but does that mean that I can't edit and test without effecting the existing website? I'm still kind of green and don't want to mess anything up!

Yes you can edit and test all you want without effecting anything as long as you don't upload the site back to the server. I don't know much about filezilla so if that's editing the files on the server then don't do it but if you took those files and copied them to your computer edit away. If you want to view php files you're going to have to get a server running on your computer with apache mysql and php. There are total packages and lots of tutorials online for setting that up. If you're on windows you'll want WAMP, Mac you'll want MAMP, or you can run XAMPP (my personal favorite) on either system.