Working Without a Site

[ LiB ]

New to Dreamweaver MX 2004, it's finally possible to work without a defined site of any kind. This is handy if you just have a one-off page that you need to build, and you don't want to have to stop and set up a site just for that purpose.

To work without a site, in the Site panel's site-selection drop-down menu choose Computer (see Figure 17.29). Instead of displaying a list of files in the local site folder, the Site panel now shows an expandable list view of your computer's file system. You can use this list to browse to any document that you want to open or insert. Dreamweaver won't insist that any of these files be in the local root folder, won't create absolute links for files outside any local root folder, and won't offer to copy files into a local root folder. Of course, you can't take advantage of any of the site-management features covered in this and subsequent chapters, but that's the trade-off.

Figure 17.29. The Site panel in siteless mode, showing the computer's file system and available servers connections.

[ LiB ]