Knowledgebase

Macromedia Dreamweaver is a website authoring tool. It has everything you need to develop a professional website. Dreamweaver is a WYSIWYG (what-you-see-is-what-you-get) editor, meaning that you can create the Web page exactly as you want it to look on the screen, and the program adds the HTML source code necessary to make sure that the page looks right in a Web browser. It also offers FTP capabilities. This section of the FTP manual will take you through all of the necessary steps to FTP your site directly from Dreamweaver.

Setting up a Remote Folder

After you set up a local folder for a Dreamweaver site, you can set up a remote folder. This is the folder you will use to FTP your site.

Determine how you will access the remote folder and note the connection information. This section describes how to set up a remote folder and connect to it.

Setting up a remote folder:

1. Select Site>Manage Sites. The Manage Sites dialog box will open.
2. Select an existing Dreamweaver site. If you have not defined any Dreamweaver sites, create a local folder before proceeding.
3. Click Edit. The Site Definition dialog box will open.
4. Click the Advanced button if the Advanced settings aren't showing.
5. Select Remote Info from the Category list on the left.
6. Select FTP in the Access options. For more information, click the Help button in the dialog box.
7. Enter your FTP host. This is the domain name you registered for your site. For example, if you had registered yourdomain.com, you would enter yourdomain.com.
8. Enter the Host Directory. This is /var/www/html.
9. Enter your Login information (yourdomain@yourdomain.com). For example, if you registered yourdomain.com, you would enter yourdomain@yourdomain.com. This is username@yourdomain.com. The username is any user you have set up with FTP access.
10. Enter your password. This is the same as the password for your site manager.
11. Click OK. Dreamweaver will create a connection to the remote folder.

Connecting to a remote folder with FTP access:

1. In the Files panel, click the Connects to Remote Host button in the toolbar. If your site uses FTP with SSH to access your remote folder, a command prompt will ask you to log in to the SSH server when you try to connect to your remote server.
2. After you log in, click OK in the Dreamweaver dialog box.

Disconnect In the Files Panel

1. In the Files panel, click the Disconnect button in the toolbar.

Important FTP Server Disconnect Information

Properly disconnecting from your FTP server is critical to maintaining the availability of your FTP server. To better understand why it is important you should have a little knowledge of how an FTP server operates. Initially, when you connect to your FTP server, a single FTP process is spawned. This process is spawned to manage the connection but does not manage transferring your data itself. Once you begin to transfer files across the connection additional processes will be spawned to handle the transfer up to the FTP process limit imposed by your hosting provider. As you can see, generally speaking, successful use of an FTP server will use more than one process. Your FTP client does control the number of processes that are spawned and when those processes will die off after the transfer is complete. Now that we have a simplistic description of what is happening we can also establish why proper use of your FTP client is important to maintaining server availability. As you can see there is some responsibility placed on your FTP client to manage the FTP connection and processes. If a disconnection is handled improperly, your FTP client isn't allowed to clean up after itself and can potentially leave FTP processes running on your server indefinitely. This only becomes a problem when you try to establish a connection to your FTP server and the FTP processes left running from improper disconnects are equal to or higher than your FTP process limit. To allow your FTP client to properly close the connection you should find and utilize the disconnect function if your client supports the functionality. You should avoid simply closing the application unless this is the only option that your client supports.