Couple of questions about DWT pages

[rtowe]

Hello. My name is DeWayne and I am new to Expression Web. I have been using it for about 4 months now. I am a student worker for a local community college that I attend where I help maintain the college's website.

Most of the site is built around Dynamic Web Templates (DWTs). We are in the process of changing the look and converting the HTML pages to PHP and tying them to new DWTs.

One problem we encounter is that when we go to File in Expression and click New, then Create from DWT, the blank HTML page is in view, but the computers basically freeze up and won't let us edit. The workaround is to open TaskManager, force close the Expression Application, but click cancel before it closes. This allows us to proceed with editing and creating the page. We have to do this EVERY time we create a new page from a DWT. We are all using Windows 7. I have Expression Web 4 and the other to workers have Version 2.

The second issue is that anytime we need to make a change to a DWT, all PHP pages tied to the template have to be open in Expression in order to apply the changes to them. Changes are automatically applied to HTML pages even if they are not open.

Any information would be greatly appreciated. Thank you

[Cheryl D Wise]

Most folks don't use server side processing with DWTs all that often. I don't recall having any issues with the pages that have the php extension not updating when they are closed though.

Crashing on new pages from DWT shouldn't be happening. Have you tried running the FPCleaner utility for your version of Expression Web?

If you have corruption in your meta data that should help clear it out.

What version of Expression Web are you using?

A couple of potential workarounds include creating a new empty page then dropping the DWT on it in design view will give you the same effect as "new from dwt". You might also check with your server administrators (I'm assuming that your college runs its own server hosting the website) and see if they are willing to map html pages to process php code. I've done that on websites that I've converted from static html to php processed data driven websites. That way the page names can stay with an html extension and we don't have to do 301 redirects on the server to the new pages.