Adobe Dreamweaver Team Blog

We often hear from people: “I’m on a new computer. How do I get all of my Dreamweaver sites over to the new computer as well?”

Variations on this theme include: “My computer got wiped out; how can I get my sites back?” as well as “I had to reinstall Dreamweaver and lost all of my sites. How can a restore them?”

The answer to all of these questions is that you must import Dreamweaver site definitions (information that is kept in an .ste file) in order to restore a previous site. As Adobe Community Expert David Powers says, “Losing your site definitions in Dreamweaver can be a disaster, but it does happen sometimes. The best way to prepare for such an eventuality is to back up your site definitions on a regular basis.”

Create backups of your site definitions

You can back up all of your site definitions in a single operation:

1. In Dreamweaver, choose Site > Manage Sites.
2. In the Manage Sites dialog box, Shift-click to select all site names.
3. Click Export.
   
4. Dreamweaver asks if you want to include passwords and login details (this is the default option). Whichever option you choose will be applied to all sites, so if you want to export passwords/login details for some sites and not others, click Cancel and then export your sites in two sets by using Ctrl/Cmd-click to select them.
5. Click OK.
   Dreamweaver asks where you’d like to save the exported site definitions. Navigate to a suitable location, leave the File name field unchanged, and click Save. Although only one site name is listed in the File name field, Dreamweaver exports all of the site definitions as .ste files in a single operation.

NOTE: This process backs up only the details of your sites, such as the location of the root folder, FTP details, and so on. It does not back up the actual files in your site, such as .html (or .php, .asp, .cfm) files, images, and style sheets. It’s a good idea to use your normal file backup routine on your actual files from time to time, as well as exporting the site definitions.

Restore site definitions

In the event of losing your site definitions in Dreamweaver or moving to a new computer, open the Manage Sites dialog box (Sites > Manage Sites), and use the Import button to navigate to your backup .ste files.

For more detailed step-by-step instructions you can consult the Import site settings documentation in Dreamweaver Help.

Thanks to David Powers, who posted the original version of this topic on the Adobe Dreamweaver forum.

Here’s a really annoying problem that we often hear people asking about: how do I get rid of a blue border that surrounds an image when I make the image a link?

Annoying blue border around a linked image

Some people will tell you to simply set a zero border in the Dreamweaver Property inspector, but according to David Powers, you should really use CSS instead.

Here’s how to do it:

1. Create a new CSS rule for linked images, either in the head of the document or in an external style sheet. (We recommend the latter.)
   The new rule looks like this:
   a img { border: none; }
   Note: If you don’t know anything about creating CSS rules, you’ll need to read up on some basic CSS info first.
2. If you’ve created the rule in a <style> block in the head of your document, you don’t need to do anything else. If you’ve created the rule in an external style sheet, make sure the sheet is linked to the page that’s displaying the annoying border.

Creating a CSS style to remove borders automatically removes the blue border from ALL images that you’ve turned into links. If you use an external style sheet, and link it to all the pages in your site, the same rule affects every image link in your site. This is a much more efficient method of eliminating those pesky borders than adding zero to the border property for every image in your website!

Thanks to David Powers, who originally posted this helpful tip in the Adobe Dreamweaver Forum.

This posting is a few weeks overdue, but we thought we should inform blog readers directly about the Dreamweaver 11.5.1 updater, released on June 9th. The updater fixes a number of bugs in Dreamweaver CS5.5, including:

• Android SDK EZ installation failure
• Various Macintosh crashes
• Nested CSS files failing to be read by Live View
• Windows version of the Native Application Settings dialog box missing Startup Screen option
• Custom JS function code hinting not working

Please be sure to download the Dreamweaver 11.5.1 updater so that you don’t experience any of these problems. To get the updater, open Dreamweaver and choose Help > Updates.

Yesterday, Adobe released the Dreamweaver CS5 11.0.2 Updater. The updater fixes a few critical bugs that were discovered after the shipping of CS5, including application launch failure on some Macintosh machines, and crashing when choosing to undo operations with Live View turned on. In addition, the updater includes the Browser Lab/Dreamweaver integration work for CMS support that went into 11.0.1.

Some Macintosh users have reported site definition usernames and passwords disappearing after updating. You can resolve this issue by restarting your computer.

Other users have reported losing their site definitions after installing the update, so be sure to export your site definitions before running the updater. (Site > Manage Sites > select a site/sites, click Export, and save the definitions to a location on your hard drive.)

A number of problems have come up for pre-release users trying to access the new Community Help Client.
If you get an installation error when you first launch the Adobe Help application in CS5 and elect to install the CHC update, see the following tech note:
http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/842/cpsid_84215.html
If you have any other problems with the help client after ship, do a clean install of the Adobe Help application as described in the tech note above. Old pre-release versions of Adobe Help may have left files behind that could cause problems for the latest version of the app.

Today a small but very helpful feature was added to Adobe BrowserLab, the Adobe web hosted service that helps you check for cross-browser compatibility. You can now save screenshots that BrowserLab generates, for easy reference or to send around to others.
If you have Dreamweaver CS4, make sure to download the BrowserLab extensions, so that you can launch the service directly from Dreamweaver, and exclusively preview frozen Javascript menus, Ajax data, local content, and more. All you need to do is download and install the two BrowserLab extensions. (Note – the BrowserLab team has made a couple changes to the extensions, so if you already have them installed you’ll need to delete them and install the new ones).
BrowserLab is currently available as a limited free preview.

Not only is the title of this blog posting a topic of interest for many, many Dreamweaver users, it is also the title of a brand new book by Dreamweaver Community Expert and moderator, David Powers. We’re very excited about this book because it promises to teach the very best CSS methods and techniques, from one of the best educators out there.
Between now and February 26th, 2010, APRESS is actually offering readers of this blog a 50% discount on the ebook version of Getting Started with CSS. Visit www.apress.com, search for the book by title, click the BUY AS EBOOK button, and enter the promotional code: DWBLOGMR.
Mr. Powers (the name is apt) is one of the most active members on the Adobe Dreamweaver forums, so if you have questions or comments about his book, you can always find him there.

There have been many, many posts on the Dreamweaver forums about problems with displaying FLV files. We’ve just updated the CS4 documentation to include a new troubleshooting section that might help a lot of you who are having problems. As this is a much-talked-about issue, please publicize this troubleshooting information as much as possible on other blogs and forums if you’re able to do that.
Special thanks to David Powers who originally alerted us to the need for such a doc.
The doc does not and cannot cover all issues. There are still many users for whom this doc won’t provide a solution. But hopefully, the information provided will be able to help a good majority of people having trouble with FLV.

I wanted to alert everyone to another great new Community article published by Adobe Community Expert David Powers. The article details how to attach CSS style sheets automatically when you create new documents.
Here’s the article:
http://kb2.adobe.com/community/publishing/505/cpsid_50564.html
This handy option is easy to miss, especially if you don’t use the New Document Dialog box to create documents, so big thanks to David for highlighting this.
Furthermore, the appearance of such an article is a great example of how Community content can interact and live symbiotically with Adobe Help. We’ve linked directly to David’s piece from our documentation, and this is indeed a great thing because David is able to go into much more detail about the process of automatically attaching style sheets than we are able to do in Help:
Create a blank page
Create a page with a CSS layout
If you’re interested in publishing Community articles of your own, download the Community Publishing AIR application.