Editing Forum using Micromedia Dreamweaver

[McDoogle]

Hey, i just got dreamweaver and ive set everything up but how to you edit the bases of the forum like styling it etc, i can view the code and that but in design it comes up with a white screen.

[Highway of Life]

white BACKground.

Everything looks good!! -- Remember, even editing styles, you have to know a fair amount of code to do it.

It's a template system, so you are not going to get a WYSIWYG preview.

[Freelance]

To work on phpBB, you have to know what you're doing.
So you have to understand at least HTML for styling in the templates
and php to alter the code

without that knowledge, it's useless to even try and change anything.

[Rotsblok]

without that knowledge, it's useless to even try and change anything.

Its not quite useless. You can learn what is used where. and from there you can "alter" the layout. From there you start trying new things. with trail and error you can get a long way, but its a very hard and difficult way

[Greenweaver]

Using Dreamweaver is great for helping you code HTML or even php for that matter as it colours syntax for you which is always a great visual aid. However if you have developed a website using Dreamweaver before you will be aware that Dreamweaver remembers things such as where "image a" or "image b" is located according to the current file you are working on hence it displays them in code and design view. PhpBB has it’s own template system which Dreamweaver does not understand which is why you may see the blank pages. Editing phpbb with dreamweaver is not as simple as dropping and changing images like you would normally do.

If you open a php file in Dreamweaver then the page will definitely be blank (or white), because the php files do not contain any HTML to display in design view plus the php is not being parsed as it would be on the web server so you wont see anything anyhow. It is recommended that you do not use Dreamweaver to edit phpbb files as it can sometimes cause issues such as auto-format and it can also change character case therefore It is best to stick to a good text editor.

If you really want to use Dreamweaver then stick to the Code view as this shouldl keep you in good order, again, this is ok for editing HTML but as for editing the php I would not guarantee it would be flawless so just keep an eye on the code.

So there is a good side and a bad side to Dreamweaver.

[Highway of Life]

I use mainly Dreamweaver and SubEthaEdit for all of my code writing.
SubEthaEdit is a good basic text editor with syntax highlighting, which can come in handy as a visual aid. It will also convert to varies types of encoding, and has an option to display invisible characters.

For windows, you can get Crimson Editor, there should also be a system default app called VIM, or head over to the list of text editors on Wiki to find one that you like.

Dreamweaver is good for using proper code formatting with it's use of Tabs and spaces, plus the ability to tab increase or decrease multiple lines of code at once is a real time-saver.
As long as you configure the preferences correctly, you are not going to have problems with some of Dreamweaver's automated actions and formatting.