Working With Sites
When you create a Web site, you first create a set of Web documents and related resource files on your computer, and then publish (upload) them to a Web server. Technically speaking, the Web site consists of the copies of your files on the Web server—not the original files on your local file system, since these are not available on the Web.
There are two ways of managing these local files. First, you can manage them as you would any other set of files on your hard drive, using a file manager such as Windows Explorer. However, a more powerful way to manage them is to create a local site in Namo WebEditor to contain the local files. This approach has several advantages.
In Namo WebEditor, a local site is a managed collection of Web documents, folders, and resource files on the local file system that you intend to publish as a Web site. A local site gathers local files into a cohesive whole and lets you manage them as a whole, with Namo WebEditor’s Site Manager.
There are five major advantages of creating and using a local site, as opposed to simply keeping all your local files in a folder and managing them with Windows Explorer:
- If you rename a file or folder that is part of a local site, Namo WebEditor can automatically update any links that refer to it.
- A local site can have a site tree, making it possible to use dynamic navigation bars in your documents.
- You can manage shared resources (such as image files) in a site library.
- You can use Quick Publish to publish the entire local site, or any part of it, in one step.
- If you work as part of a team on the same site, you can use source control to prevent conflicts that can arise when multiple people edit the same document.
Creating a local site is easy. You can create one when you start building a Web site, or you can put an existing collection of files into a local site. If you create a site using the Site Wizard, Namo WebEditor creates a local site automatically.
When you create a local site, Namo WebEditor adds a special file named site.wej and a special folder named _we_info5 in the local site’s top-level folder. These special items store site information and internal resources. By default, these items are not visible in the Site Manager, although you can see them in Windows Explorer. Do not delete these items unless you want to delete the local site.