Chapter12.Building Dreamweaver Web Sites within Teams

Chapter 12. Building Dreamweaver Web Sites within Teams

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Using File Check In and Check Out

• Maintaining Design Notes

• File View Column Sharing

• Working with Reports

• Implementing Source Control with Visual SourceSafe

• Using WebDAV

Dreamweaver, like most web page editors, allows you to quickly and easily design websites. Through the use of its many panels, windows, inspectors, and bars, Dreamweaver, in conjunction with your creativity, can facilitate this evolution. At its heart though, Dreamweaver is like most web page editors on the market today. The difference with Dreamweaver however, lies in the intricacies exposed to help you along as either an individual website developer or even a developer working in a collaborative team.

While we'll certainly discuss the nuances that make Dreamweaver unique from other web page editors (we've already gone over some), this chapter focuses on the exclusive functionality available for working in teams. Specifically, we'll discuss Dreamweaver's built in source control functionality in its file Check In and Check Out. Using this functionality you can easily share remote files with other members of your team without worrying about who's working on what and whether or not you'll be overriding someone else's work if you save a file remotely. Additionally, we'll review Design Notes in great detail. While you can use Design Notes as an aid in individual development, Design Notes really comes in handy when working with offsite collaborative teams. Instead of picking up the phone and manually telling someone of changes or revisions that need to be made to a file, you can simply add a Design Note to a file, in which case the Design Note is also uploaded to the remote server. When a member of the team opens the file, you can set properties to have the Design Note automatically open, revealing the changes or revisions that need to be made. Furthermore we'll discuss Dreamweaver's handling of site reports. As a manager of a web development team you might find this functionality particularly useful in that you can generate reports on a file, group of files, or an entire site regarding issues such as poorly written HTML, invalid HTML, or even who's checked out what and for how long. Finally, we'll review Dreamweaver's integration with third-party source control options such as Microsoft's Visual SourceSafe or the IETF open standard WebDAV.

As you've done with the rest of the chapters in this book, you can work with the examples in this chapter by downloading the files from www.dreamweaverunleashed.com. You'll want to save the files for Chapter 12 in an easy-to-find location. I'll place mine in C:\Dorknozzle\Chapter12.