Operation Manual

52
USING DREAMWEAVER
Working with Dreamweaver sites
Last updated 3/28/2012
If you don’t want these Contribute special files to appear on your publicly accessible server, you can set up a staging
server where Contribute users work on pages. Then periodically copy those web pages from the staging server to a
production server that’s on the web. If you take this staging-server approach, copy only web pages to the production
server, not any of the above-listed Contribute special files. In particular, don’t copy the _mm and _baks folders to
the production
server.
Note: For information about setting up a server to prevent visitors from seeing files in folders that begin with an
underscore, see “Website security” in Contribute Help.
Occasionally you might need to manually delete Contribute special files. For example, there might be
circumstances in which Contribute fails to delete temporary preview pages when the user is finished previewing; in
that case, you would have to manually delete those temporary pages. Temporary preview pages have filenames that
begin with TMP.
Similarly, under some circumstances an outdated lock file may be accidentally left on the server. If that happens,
you must manually delete the lock file to allow others to edit the page.
Prepare a site for use with Contribute
If you’re preparing an existing Dreamweaver site for Contribute users, you need to explicitly enable Contribute
compatibility to use Contribute-related features; Dreamweaver does not prompt you to do this; however, when you
connect to a site that’s been set up as a Contribute site (that has an administrator), Dreamweaver prompts you to
enable Contribute compatibility.
Not all connection types support Contribute compatibility. The following restrictions apply to connection types:
• If your remote site connection uses WebDAV, you can’t enable Contribute compatibility, because those source-
control systems aren’t compatible with the Design Notes and Check In/Check Out systems that Dreamweaver uses
for Contribute sites.
• If you use RDS to connect to your remote site, you can enable Contribute compatibility, but you must customize
your connection before you can share it with Contribute users.
• If you’re using your local computer as a web server, you must set up the site using an FTP or network connection
to your computer (rather than just a local folder path) to be able to share your connection with Contribute users.
When you enable Contribute compatibility, Dreamweaver automatically enables Design Notes (including the Upload
Design Notes For Sharing option) and the Check In/Check Out system.
If Contribute Publishing Server (CPS) is enabled on the remote site you are connecting to, Dreamweaver notifies the
CPS every time you trigger a network operation such as checking in, rolling back, or publishing a file. The CPS will log
these events, and you can view the log in the CPS Administration Console. (If you disable CPS, these events are not
logged.) You enable CPS using Contribute. For more information, see Adobe Contribute Help.
Note: You can make a site Contribute compatible without having Contribute on your computer; but if you want to be
able to start Contribute Administrator from Dreamweaver, you must have Contribute installed on the same computer as
Dreamweaver and you must be connected to the remote site before you enable Contribute compatibility. Otherwise,
Dreamweaver cannot read Contribute’s administrative settings to determine whether CPS and Rollback are enabled.