Glad I could help. ... View more

I'll be brief. Jon, you said that "you can't paste anything into a textarea without it losing the code." And as I kept saying, that simply isn't true. Did you notice the word "anything" above? That, Jon, was your choice of words. It really isn't clear to me why the OP can't right-click and copy the link, and it isn't clear to me why he needs the link to be clickable in the textarea. Sometimes people think they need to do something a certain way, when they really don't. lastly, as I suggested a few posts up, try dragging and dropping a link (the name of a link)  into a textarea. It should bring it in as HTML. This method may have some browser/doctype limitations, but many of my clients use this method with good results. Everything I've just said, I had already said before. ... View more

Thank you Toonces, well spoken. I did not at first understand that you wanted the link to be clickable in the textarea itself. Probably because that doesn't make sense to me. You can achieve this using an iframe overlay for the textarea. Many simple CMSs use this technique. You can then toggle back and forth between code view and rendered view. Anyway, I did misunderstand you at first. I thought you were simply saying that code pasted into the textarea would not render. I assumed the rendering was later, when the text was returned to a page. That's why I thought validation was an isuse. But what fired me up was nothing you said, but Jon's statement that: If you paste anything into a standard text area, it loses it's html formatting and becomes plain text That's not true  if the actual code is pasted, dragged in or typed in. Do I really need to demonstrate this? Sometimes what people are trying to do is something they only think they need to do. I wonder if you really do need to have the link clickable inside the textarea. Anyway, I did not think of the iframe solution yesterday. I have two files, one PHP, one JS that demonstrates this. I can put up a link of you are really interested. I was condescending, but to Jon, not to you. Even though Jon's assertion regarding textboxes is incorrect, I apologize to him for having been harsh. ... View more

If you paste ANYTHING into a standard text area, it loses it's html formatting and becomes plain text Jon, for the second time, this statement is completely untrue. Paste some html code, including a link, into a textarea. The code will be retained. Now the code might get sanitized out by the form validation, but that is a different issue and a solvable problem. You can also drag and drop the link title into a textarea, and the full link will paste in, however, this may not work in some browsers and on some webpages. The probem is in the way you and the OP are trying to get the link into the textarea. You are not copyng the link, you are copying the link name. Copy the link instead. ... View more

You cannot do that with a standard textarea. If you paste anything into a standard text area, it loses it's html formatting and becomes plain text . Jon, that is completely  incorrect. If you paste html, PHP or javascript into a textarea --as script-- the code is retained. In fact, the whole premise of a content managment system is that you can paste code into a textarea. My clients paste mountains of HTML garbage into textareas that they copy from MSWord and websites. I then have ot write code to sanitize it. So I am going to say just one more time: The textarea is NOT THE PROBLEM and a DIV is not the solution. Anyway, I think the real problem is in what the OP is trying to do. He needs to reconsider what he wants the result to be. He's trying to get there the wrong way. ... View more

Jon, he says he is cutting and pasting hyperlinks, not the "name" of the hyperlink (like Discussions), so it's actually your post I don't understand. And even so, a DIV would not be the solution. ... View more

A textarea and an editable div are both trancient entities. When you close the page, whatever is in them disappears, unless you save the content and re-display it. A textarea is a form element. After the content of the textarea is passed to a database, you call it back to your webpage--not as a textarea, but just as text. So, like I said, I have put hyperlinks in textareas about ten thousand times over the past ten years. I think you may not understand how to work with basic form elements. You don't need javascript to solve your problem. You need to understand basic HTML and form processing. ... View more

You say you found out that it's not possible to paste hyperlinks into a form textarea??? We do it all the time. So what's going on? Is it that your form validation sanitizes the hyperlink code? Then change the form validation. ... View more

From the PHP manual: For those accustomed to using mysql_real_escape_string(), note that the arguments of mysqli_real_escape_string() differ from what mysql_real_escape_string() expects. The link identifier comes first in mysqli_real_escape_string(), whereas the string to be escaped comes first in mysql_real_escape_string(). ... View more

The answer is yes, unless there is a permissions/ownership issue. For instance, on a Linux server, if PHP is running via DSO, your image directories and files may be owned by "nobody" and your FTP account, which DW uses to manage the files, may not have permissions to delete or modify the files and directories. Chances are, you will not encounter the issue described above. So if you have set up your external server correctly in DW, you should be able to browse the files/directories on the external server using DW, and manage them. Also, even if you did have an ownership/permission issue, it would probably be solvable. ... View more

Firstly, don't write your code so that you actually move from one page (file) to another. Most of the websites I build have just one "page" although to the visitor, it looks like there are many pages. That one "page" contains a lot of conditionals to determine what the visitor will be presented with. It may take a while before you can refine your coding to the point of a single "page" but get your mind around the idea that what the visitors sees as a page, doesn't necessarily have to be a new file. So for instance, if you have presented the user with a list of records, and you want to give them the opportunity to delete records, you can go through the whole process in that same file. There are many ways to do this. The best way is  to use AJAX, but it can also be done with just PHP. PHP cannot redirect from one script to another after anything has been sent to the browser. You can have many lines of computer code before the the redirect, but once anything, even just a <html> tag has been sent, you can't redirect using PHP. That being said, the method of redirecting using PHP is like this: header('Location:../index.php'); die(); With Javascript, you can redirect at any point. the code is similar but I'm not going to show it here. So using PHP, what you would do is put code like this at the very top of the script: if (is_numeric ($_GET['confirmed'])){  //check if the GET variable confirmed has been populated (because someone clicked a "confirm delete" link $id=$_GET['confirmed']; //just to convert the GET variable to a local variable if ($dbh->exec("DELETE FROM mytable WHERE id='$id'")){ //this code performs the delete, and also, if the delete was successful, redirects to the index.php page. header('Location:../index.php'); die(); //this makes sure the current script stops running. } else { $message = "woops! Didn't work."; //if the delete didn't work, the variable message is loaded; }} Since you have not studied PHP yet, there is a lot in this example that you won't understand, though I provided comments to explain the logic Anyway, I would not redirect to a different page, as the example does, but would simply refresh the existng script. The whole record list, delete, confirm, and return process would be done in the same script. ... View more

It works. That's good enough for me. Thanks! ... View more

If you already have experience writing database SQL scripts, then you certainly do have a good start. And if you have not written SQL, then just understanding the logic is a good start. What you need to learn then is PHP, not so much JavaScript. Try the book PHP Solutions by David Powers. It's not the book I started with. It's the book I WISH I had started with. Javascript is also good to know, but PHP is the back-end processing. Is it possible to write procedures that can be called (& reused?)? Yes, but they are called functions, not procedures. PHP also has Object Oriented features, which is like functions on steroids. You can download several different free packages of MySQL/PHP/Apache Server. I think most people (on Windows) use XAMPP, but I like Zend Server Community Edition a little better. Your web server probably has PHPMyAdmin installed for working with your database, and XAMP and ZSCC both come with PHPMyAdmin, but there are other options for managing your database, some of them free, such as HeidiSQL and MySQL workbench. ... View more

Apparently Dreamweaver really is only for the team-development model with different people having skill sets to get the job done. No, it's the web that has become more complex and specialized. It isn't Dreamweaver's fault. And this is a wonderful thing because over twelve years ago, when most sites were not dynamic and were not created by teams of professionals, the web was awlful! Really very very awful! I think that with Dreamweaver, Adobe has in fact given people a tool to create pretty nice websites all by themselves. But if you are going to put a database behind your website, then you really must acquire the necessary programming skills to use it. So I think the mistake Adobe made was t give people just enough rope to hang themselves with. I think they should never had even provided the database tools. ... View more

c.a.logan wrote: When I have raised these points before, I have felt that many out there believe that people without the appropriate skills should not be web designing. The appropriate skills have evolved enormously over the past ten years and more and more often websites are built by teams--not individuals. An e-commerce site that includes dynamically generated content and AJAX is far out of the reach of a novice. I don't really view DW as a professional level tool in the same way as, say Zend Studio. All those Spry and data wizards are not targeting pros, but amateurs. DW is actually a pretty accessible tool for a beginner. . . as long as he or she doesn't aim beyond his/her reach. ... View more

Fortunately, if you think the data tools stink,  you can completely ignore the DW data tools and simply write your own PHP and MySQL code. There are several reasons to write your own code and NEVER use DW generated code: 1. Your code will be more terse and humanly understandable. 2. You can use the PDO or MySQLi database extensions, instead of the mysql extension, which no one should be using any longer. 3. You will be able to organize your code in meaningful ways and share code blocks across projects more easily. 4. You will comprehend your own code instead of just wildly trusting Adobe to do your thinking for you. OBSERVATION: When people who write their own code ask a forum quesiton, the will include a small amount of code to exibit where the problem lies, but when people who use data tools post a forum question, they post hundreds of lines of code that have nothing to do with the issue. Why? Because the poster has only a vague understanding of the code and hasn't got a clue where the problem is. Invariably, if someone doesn't have a very clear understanding of the code, they will get into big trouble. ... View more