PLEASE NOTE: All CMIT modules have now been withdrawn, and are unavailable for the 2010/11 academic year
These web pages and lecture notes are left as reference for those students requiring CMIT modules to complete their programme only, and are not an indication of modules currently offered.

Practical Internet Programming
Getting Started (2)

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Using Dreamweaver to Write PHP

The best way to get started with your programming tasks is to use Dreamweaver, which is installed in the LaTiS computer suite, and some other computer rooms around campus. You don't have to use Dreamweaver to write PHP (a text editor such as notepad is sufficient) but it makes it easier to get started.

If you have installed XAMPP on your own computer, then notes are provided (in brackets) where changes to the setup are needed; you will need a copy of Dreamweaver (at least version 8) installed on the same computer as the XAMPP server.

Configuring Dreamweaver for the CMIT test server

Start Dreamweaver (on the cluster PCs, it's under local applications/CMIT/Macromedia).
Click on Manage Sites in the Files toolbox, or drop down the Sites box (here it shows "Desktop"), or choose Sites > Manage Sites... from the main menus
Create a New... Site.
Give it a reasonably meaningful name.
We're creating a PHP site, so choose PHP MySQL.
Choose to Edit locally, then upload. If you're working on the University computers, it's a good plan to leave the locally stored files on the U: drive, though you could change this to your USB stick.
(On your own computer, use the browse icon to point this to somewhere sensible within My Documents)
Now choose Local/Network. We're using a local Samba server, which is accessible under the name 'dobbin' (don't ask), so construct the test location using your username (mine is cu97gbs) as shown in the box.
( If you installed XAMPP, then you can set the path to c:\xampp\htdocs, which is where you'll need to place files to be served locally.)
Now the tricky bit. This is the numeric address of the server (144.173.119.2) and your username, combined into a URL. Don't forget the tilde (~) character, which indicates that this is user-space not general webspace.
(If you are working with the XAMPP setup, then point this to http://localhost/.)
It's probably also a good plan not to worry about check-in and check-out, since this is usually only used for collaborative working. Next >!
Phew! This shows a summary of your settings - you can go back and change them if they don't look quite right, or click Done to continue...
And here's the site - click Done to load it into the Files toolbox.
In the toolbox, change to Local view to begin editing.
To create a new PHP file, select File | New... from the main menu.
Under Dynamic page, choose PHP. Don't forget to check the Make document XHTML compliant box, which you should be doing by default these days!
Now you can begin writing your first PHP programs.