Dreamweaver design mode doesn't show for phpnuke

registered · New Member Joined: Sep 20, 2003 Posts: 10

I've setup a complete webserver on my Windows box so that I can begin creating PHP-nuke themes, but I'm having a problem in that DreamWeaver does't show the view of the page or site when in design mode. This occurs despite the fact that if I select 'preview in browser' within dreamweaver and it shows up fine. In other words, the phpnuke, mysql, apache and php are all setup correctly and I'm able to go to the site just fine manually and via dreamweavers preview option but it never shows up in the dreamweaver design mode area.

Can someone tell me why this is occurring or tell me how I can fix the issue so that a phpnuke site is viewable via the design view?? I'm at a loss and figured there has to be some of you who use dreamweaver and also produce php-nuke stuff, if not, please forgive the post.

Any and all help would be appreciated!

Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 8:49 am

Dreamweaver design mode can only show html pages. So if your code is "generated" html by way of PHP, it can't show that. The PHP has to be "executed" first and design mode doesn't do that. When you preview in a browser the browser executes the PHP and produces HTML which then displays on the screen.

In some themes, like Nukenews, there are html files for presentation aspects of various parts of the page and you can preview those in design mode. But not theme.php itself.

Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 9:11 am

With the page open in DW (using the split screen code/wysiwyg)temporarily remove the php start and end tags and replace with html open and close tags - not an ideal solution but it does sometimes give you an idea of what is there.

Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 11:14 am

Probably should also mention that you can look at the output of the php in your browser and do view source. Then select all and copy. Then paste it into a new file in Dreamweaver. Then you can look at it in design mode. Sometimes you can diagnose any quirks in the html that your PHP code is generating that way. But if you use design mode to make any modifications, say narrowing the width of a table, it will of course have no effect; you need to go back and modify the PHP code that's generating the html. Still, this can be a useful technique in limited circumstances to help you understand what the PHP code is doing and find problems.

Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 1:49 pm

These are excellent suggestions you guys, I appreciate it a great deal. I was afraid that you guys would tell me that there is no way to via the pages in design mode because of the php, and all the includes. It seems to me that Macromedia needs to get off their ass and provide a solution for the execution of the php code within dreamweaver, there are just too many people that run CMS's and use php as well as other scripting languages to ignore it.

I honestly can't believe that they don't have a mechanism already to allow people such as ourselves to do complete work on sites such as these.

At any rate, I guess I should complain where it needs to be heard instead of here.

Thanks again for all your help and feedback everyone!

Posted: Fri Feb 10, 2006 3:04 pm

There are supposed to be some improvements to PHP support in the latest greatest version of Dreamweaver but I lost my access to "free" software when I retired and the upgrade would come out of my own pocket. I use UEStudio most of the time now except when the "better" help screens of Dreamweaver are handy. Like if I am doing styles and I want a handy drop down of all the attributes that are valid for a given element. Or sometimes, like you say if you are looking at design and it's quicker to be able to see how the html you are cooking up will look right away and have all the properties at your fingertips.

It would be great if there was a PHP editor that would let you set watches and breakpoints and show you the values of variables as you stepped thru execution (with a kind of single step mode that I've seen in other products) and show you includes being executed: now it's mainfile, now sentinel, going into x function in sentinel, leaving x function, going to header.php and the value of $name is ... ) Now that would be the nuts but of course it's away from your initial point.