Creating a local site from files in an existing folder
If you already have a local copy of a Web site in a folder on your hard drive, and you want to manage the folder as a local siteA managed collection of documents, folders, and resource files on the local file system that you intend to publish as a Web site. with the Site Manager, you can do so by creating a new local site in that folder. All files and subfolders in the folder will be automatically added to the local site. This provides a convenient way to let Namo WebEditor “take over” a site that you have created using other software.
To create a site from an existing folder
- Click the Namo button
, point to Site and then click New Site.
- Under Site information, enter a name for the new site and (optionally) the author’s name.
- Under Site origin, click Import existing files in a folder, and then enter the path of the folder that contains the existing files. You can click the … button to browse for a folder.
- Specify the file types, if any, you want the Site Manager to include in the site tree. (See “Generating a site tree automatically”, below.)
- Click OK.
The Site Manager window will come to the front, with the new local site open and ready to use.
Generating a site tree automatically
When the Site Manager takes over an existing folder containing Web site files, it can optionally generate a site treeThe explicitly defined logical structure (hierarchy) of a site, on which dynamic navigation bars are based. for the new local site, automatically populating the tree with nodes based on the files and subfolders in the folder. The Site Manager can create nodes from any of the following file sets:
- all Web documents (HTML/ASP/PHP/JSP/SHTML files)
- all image files (GIF/JPG/PNG/BMP files)
- all Web documents and image files
- all files, regardless of type
Before having the Site Manager autogenerate a site tree for the new local site, you should decide which file types you want the Site Manager to create nodes for. In most cases, choosing Documents only is the best choice. Note that the Site Manager will always create folder nodes from any subfolders in the site folder; this behavior cannot be disabled.
To understand how the Site Manager constructs automatic site trees, consider the following, highly simplified file/folder structure for a hypothetical company site:
If you create a new local site in the www.namo.com folder and enable automatic site tree generation, the Site Manager will generate the following site tree. (Note: node titles have been changed from their defaults.)
Notice that the Site Manager has correctly identified index.html as the site’s “home page”, appropriately placing its node at the top (root) of the tree, just under the node representing the site itself. Each of the other two top-level documents, about.html and contact.html, becomes a child node of the home page node. The top folder’s immediate subfolders, products and support, become folder nodes at the same level, while the contents of those subfolders become their child nodes, and so forth.
The purpose of creating folder nodes in autogenerated site trees is mainly to provide a way to visualize the folder structure of the site. Folder nodes are not actually represented in dynamic navigation barsA set of hyperlinks that are automatically updated by Namo WebEditor depending on what documents occupy specified positions in the site tree.. If the top-level index page in the above example contains a dynamic navigation bar linking to its child nodes, that bar will not include links to the products and support index pages, since those index pages are not immediate children of the top-level index page. To include the products and support index pages in the navigation bar, you would need to move those nodes up, putting them on the same level as the “about” and “contact” pages. In fact, it often makes sense to eliminate folder nodes altogether, after moving their (document) child nodes to appropriate positions in the tree, as in this example:
(Note that the moved “index” nodes have been renamed to “products”, “webeditor”, and “support”, respectively.)