Defining Your Site

Before you build the forum, you need to set up your site in Dreamweaver. For a quick site setup, take a look at this TechNote: How to Define a Site in Dreamweaver. A minimal setup requires you to configure at least these sections:

• Local Info, which identifies the site files in Dreamweaver and enables the site management features
• Remote Info, which defines the settings to access the remote web server where your site will be uploaded
• Testing Sever, which defines a private place to act like a public server to test the application and connections to the database

Follow the instructions in this TechNote and make sure you set the server model to PHP MySQL in the Testing Server section.

Download the tutorial sample files and unzip them to your site’s root folder. Figure 5 shows what the Files panel should look like in Dreamweaver.

Figure 5. Files panel showing the initial files for the forum application

In the next section, you will set up and connect to your database.