If you are a communication lead for an academic unit, you probably have some level 4 centers in your site that someone else maintains. Problem is, with Dreamweaver you are constantly tripping over those files during your routine work. Well, have you considered cloaking those folders?
Cloaking folders on your local copy tells Dreamweaver you are not interested in what goes on in that directory. Dreamweaver will skip it during synchronization, check-in check-outs, etc. You still have access to your whole site and can easily turn cloaking off if you want to do work in the section.
Cloak and Uncloak Files or Folders
Pretty simple. With your site open go to the local files pane and locate the folder you would like to cloak.
- In the Files panel (Window > Files), select a site that has site cloaking enabled.
- Select the folder(s) or file(s) you want to cloak or uncloak.
- Right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Macintosh), then select Cloaking > Cloak or Cloaking > Uncloak from the context menu.
A red line through the file or folder icon appears or disappears, indicating that the folder is cloaked or uncloaked.
Note: You can still perform an operation on a specific cloaked file or folder by selecting the item in the Files panel and performing an operation on it. Performing an operation directly on a file or folder overrides cloaking.
Note: You can cloak specific files and folders, but you cannot cloak all files and folders or cloak an entire site. When you cloak specific files and folders, you can cloak multiple files and folders at the same time.
Yeah, That Totally Didn’t Work
Cloaking may not be enabled. Go through the cloaking motions again, but this time look for “Enable Cloaking” on the pop-up window.
- In the Files panel (Window > Files) select a file or folder.
- Right-click (Windows) or Control-click (Macintosh), and do one of the following:
- Select Cloaking > (deselect to disable).
- Select Cloaking > Settings to open the Cloaking category of the Site Setup dialog box. Select or deselect
If all that fails, contact Jeff.
Watch Out For…
You can opt to cloak certain file types, like .txt or .css, and I think that is asking for trouble. Say for example you only have the web team update the css on your site so you opt to cloak all css files. Eventually your local version will be so out of date with the remote version that previewing your site will look off.
In another scenario, perhaps you are holding back a file type that only you are working on, well if something happens to your work station, you will lose the only copy of that file. Boooo.
Under that same theory of don’t have just a local copy. If you are building up a new section of your web site, use a “!” to keep it from going live rather than cloak the section. Two reasons for this: First, you cannot properly preview the new section unless it is on the remote server. Second, if something happens to your workstation you will lose the only copy of your work.