Posted by on Friday, July 16th, 2010 at 4:48 pm.
Hi and welcome to this week’s web design video blog. Today we’re going to take a look at Dreamweaver’s Live View feature. After taking a look – we’ll show you how you can use Live View when developing dynamic websites that are built in PHP – like WordPress for example.
So – Live View is a relatively new feature in Adobe Dreamweaver. It first appeared in CS4 – but has since been improved and evolved in the recent CS5 release. Before we get into too much depth with Live View – and how to configure it for dynamic web design, let’s take a look at how works with some basic HTML pages.
Setting up MAMP to enable Live View
So – Live View gives the designer convenient access to a ‘Browser Rendered’ version of the website – without the need to jump back and forth between Dreamweaver and a seperate browser. If however, like us, the majority of websites you develop are dynamic – Live View will not work without the assistance of a local server to execute the script. The easiest way to create this environment when using a Mac, is to use the free application – MAMP. If you’re unfamiliar with MAMP we would recommend watching last week’s video blog where we explained what MAMP is and how to install it.
Thank you for watching this week’s video, don’t forget if you would like to know more about MAMP and how to install it – you can watch last week’s video.
Related External Links
- Adobe Recommend MAMP for creating a PHP Environment.
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/dreamweaver/articles/setting_up_php_03.html
Channel
on July 16th, 2010 Says:
Ahh yes, “Live View” it really is one of the best new features of Adobe CS4/CS5. I use it all the time. Instead of using MAMP, I simply use “localhost”. It seems to render correctly on the page.
Would you be able to do some tutorials on how to make web URLs more SEO friendly? So for example, instead of having to type the full filename of a page (e.g. “www.example.co.uk/blog.php”), is there any way you can simply type “www.example.co.uk/blog”? I would highly appreciate it if there was any information on this topic that you can give.
Thanks very much,
Craig A. Riches
on July 17th, 2010 Says:
Hi Craig, thank you for your comment. I’ll see if we can do a video blog soon on URL Rewrites. This is usually done in two ways. Firstly, you could simply save a file as index.php inside a folder called /blog.
Alternatively, dynamic methods involve creating or editing what is called a .htaccess file. Keep your eyes peeled for an up-coming video.
on July 28th, 2010 Says:
Disregard my last comment, I have found out how to use/edit the .htaccess file, using the “mod_rewrite” function. Thanks for giving the heads up about the .htaccess file. Thanks again for the tutorials, sorry if I have wasted your time.
on August 1st, 2010 Says:
No problem at all Craig, you’ve given me a topic for a future video blog! All the best. James.