Connecting Dreamweaver CS5 to a Drupal Site
As I mentioned earlier, configuring a Dreamweaver site to edit a Drupal site is pretty much the same as configuring any other Dreamweaver site. Along the way, you'll need to watch out for couple of pitfalls, which I'll point out in the following steps.
- Launch Dreamweaver CS5 and choose Site > New Site to define a Dreamweaver CS5 site.
- In the Site Setup dialog, enter a site name. This name should be descriptive, particularly if you're going to have several websites.
- In the Local Site Folder field, use the Browse for Folder button to navigate to the folder on your local computer that will hold a local version of the files at your remote Drupal server.
- In the column on the left of the Site Setup dialog, click the Servers panel. Click the Add New Server button (it shows a plus sign) at the bottom of the (currently empty) list of servers.
- In the Basic tab of the Servers panel of the Site Setup dialog, enter a name for your server. (This name can be anything that helps you to remember the name of the server.) Open the Connect Using pop-up list and select FTP. Enter the FTP address, username, password, and root directory provided by your web hosting service. (This information is provided to you when you sign up for hosting.)
- In the Web URL text box, enter the URL for your website.
- Click the Test button in the middle of the dialog to verify your connection (see Figure 2). If the test doesn't produce a successful result, open the More Options section of the Site Setup dialog and select Use Passive FTP. If you're still unable to test your connection successfully, something is probably wrong with the FTP address, username, password, or root directory you entered[md]recheck that information with your web hosting provider.
- After you've tested your server connection successfully, click Save. Return to the version of the Site Setup dialog that displays all four categories (Site, Servers, Version Control, and Advanced Settings), and check the Live and Staging checkboxes next to the server connection you just defined.
Figure 2 Testing a server connection.
You've almost linked Dreamweaver and Drupal. In the following section, I'll show you how to open a page from your Drupal site in Dreamweaver and edit the styles.