How can I connect Dreamweaver and WordPress?

Hi Janine,

I am reading your new book Dreamweaver For Dummies and saw in your book that you discuss WordPress and CS5. I purchased CS5 to work with WordPress and have yet to successfully get it working with my various WordPress installations. I am not a real developer and would prefer to not create a local test environment but to work with Dreamweaver directly with the installation I have on a hosting account with GoDaddy.

It is close to working, but I get an error message about the connection to the database. The FTP access works properly. I can sync the files. Does this have anything with logging into the SQL database? Can you point me to some troubleshooting tips for the initial connection to WordPress and Dreamweaver? Everything I find, read, or watch makes it look so simple and nonproblematic. . .

Thanks
Dave

Hi Dave,

Thanks for buying my book. Dreamweaver CS5 does provide much better support for WordPress than any previous versions, but you will have to set up a local testing environment if you want WordPress files to work on your local computer the way they work on your server at GoDaddy.

That’s because WordPress generates web pages dynamically by pulling content out of a database and displaying it in a template/theme as it opens the page in a Web browser. Thus, you have to set up a database and web server on your computer if you want those pages to display on your computer. That’s not as hard as it may seem at first, but it is more complicated than simply installing Dreamweaver.

The good news for you is that you’re not alone in facing this challenge, so a couple of great services bundle all of the software you need (the Apache web server, MySQL database, PHP, etc.) into one nice package that you can download and install relatively easily on any desktop computer powerful enough to run Dreamweaver. My favorite for Windows is XAMPP www.apachefriends.org/en/xampp.html. If you use a Mac, a popular option is MAMP www.mamp.info/en/index.html.

Once you install this software and install WordPress (which you can download for free from WordPress.org), you’ll need to start the server and set up a database. You’ll find instructions for how to do this at http://codex.wordpress.org/Installing_WordPress.

If all goes well, this entire process should take less than an hour, but it’s one of those things that can be a bit tricky to get right the first time. Fortunately, you only have to do it once and from then on, you’ll be all set up to work on your blog on your computer.

An alternative is to work on elements of your blog in Dreamweaver without setting up a local server. For example, you can edit just the CSS files on your local computer by copying them to your hard drive, editing them in Dreamweaver, and then uploading them to the server again. Similarly, you can compose posts in Dreamweaver and then copy and paste them into the editor online. But to get the full functionality of WordPress on your local computer, I’m afraid you’ll have to set up a local testing server.

I hope that helps and I wish you all the best with your WordPress blogs,
Janine