Eat My Business

Making  .ini’s and .htaccess files searchable by Dreamweaver (DW) and generally configuring it to work nicely with Zend Framework.

Since Zend Framework 1.8 the Zend Tool and Zend Application are really encouraging me to use an application config .ini file to store my application data.

The trouble is, Dreamweaver MX, by default,  does not look at files of type ‘.ini’ when doing searches and find and replaces.

There are probably good reasons to have this as a default.

However, I was getting nervous when I was doing refactoring of my classes, because I had to make a point of manually checking my application ini file to see if it contained a namespace or file path that needed changing.

This step-by-step guide talks about making dreamweaver aware of .phtml files, however…if you think a bit laterally you could also use it to make dreamweaver aware of ini’s and .htaccess file extensions (obviously skipping the step that configures DW to open those file types in the  HTML WYSIWYG editor ).

i.e. In Step One, altering the C:\Program Files\Macromedia\Dreamweaver MX\Configuration\Extensions.txt

I also changed this line from:

TXT:Text Files

To

TXT,INI,HTACCESS:Text Files

——

and, then do similar variation on the other steps.

—

You will obviously have to be an experienced-enough developer to take care when doing site-wide find and replaces and remember to look out for those pesky .htaccess files. Caveat: I only did this a few a minutes ago…so i’ll keep you updated if my project is destroyed as a consequence. ;o).  You are your own person.

Why make DW aware of .phtml extensions?

.phtml is the default extension expected by Zend Framework in View Scripts.  So, while you are doing the ini thang you might as well configure Dreamweaver to work with .phtml files. Its roughly the same proceedure.

This entry was posted on Sunday, July 26th, 2009 at 10:15 am and is filed under .htaccess files, practical webmaster tips, Zend Framework, Dreamweaver, how to / guides, ini files. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.