Site Maintenance in Dreamweaver MX 2004

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX 2004 includes some useful features for easy maintenance of your site. This tutorial will cover three of these features: Check Links Sitewide, Change Link Sitewide and Find and Replace.

Check Links Sitewide
Check Links Sitewide allows you to check for broken links in just a few easy steps.

1. Go to the Site menu in Dreamweaver and select Check Links Sitewide.

2. Dreamweaver starts going through all the links in the entire site. When it is finished, it summarizes the results at the bottom of the screen.

Fix the broken link by typing in the correct link path in the Broken Links column.

3. After Show, the pull-down menu gives the three options Broken Links, External Links and Orphaned Files. Selecting Broken Links will list all broken links to files that are not found in your defined site. Selecting External Links shows links that go off of your site. These are not checked to see if they are broken or not. Selecting Orphaned Files shows files that are in your site but are not linked to in any way. Click the Close button when you are finished.

Change Link Sitewide
This features allows you to enter a recurring link in the site and have Dreamweaver replace it with a new link.

1. Go to the Site menu and select Change Link Sitewide. The Change Link Sitewide (Site - <your site name») dialog box appears.

2. After Change All Links To, enter the link that you would like changed or browse to it by clicking the folder icon on the right. After Into Links To, enter the link that you would like to replace the old link or browse to it by clicking the folder icon on the right.

Click the OK button to change the link.

Find and Replace
The Replace feature allows you to find and replace anything on your site. It is not limited only to links like Change Link Sitewide is.

1. Go to the Edit menu and select Find and Replace.

The Find and Replace dialog box appears.

2. After Find In, select Entire Current Local Site. After Search, select Text to search for text in the actual document. Select Source Code to search through the document HTML. Select Text (Advanced) to search for advanced text that has been formatted with various tags. Select Tag to search for tags. It is suggested that you search by Source Code since this option encompasses all of the others.

3. After Find, type in what you are looking for.

4. After Replace, enter the text that you'd like to replace it with.

5. There are three check boxes below the Replace box. Select Match Case to make Dreamweaver's search case sensitive. Select Ignore Whitespace Differences to make Dreamweaver ignore the space between characters. Select Use Regular Expressions to use advanced text search operators (search for "regular expressions" in help to learn more about this).

6. You have several different options to replace the text. Select Find Next to have Dreamweaver search and stop when it finds a match. Select Find All to have Dreamweaver search and list all occurrences of a match. Select Replace whenever a match is found to replace that match. Select Replace All to have Dreamweaver search for all occurrences of a match and automatically replace them.