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Participant
March 9, 2010
Question

Noob question: edit existing coldfusion page w/dreamweaver?

  • March 9, 2010
  • 1 reply
  • 1000 views

Hey all, I'm new to cold fusion so my apologies for being such a noob.
I had a quick question for you. A friend of mine has an existing, fully deployed website which was developed by someone else using coldfusion /  SQL server.
The site is pretty much just text and images, with a few flash files.  The client wants me to make some very minor tweaks to the index.cfm page  (add links, a few lines of text).
I know I need to learn more about the technology, and I will, but I can't seem to find an answer for editing a pre-developed page and making minor tweaks like this.
Do I need to have coldfusion running on my system to modify the index.cfm page with dreamweaver? Or is it like a normal HTML site where I FTP in, pull the file down, edit locally in dreamweaver, and then FTP the changed files back up to the server?
Sorry for being such a newbie.

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1 reply

ilssac
Inspiring
March 9, 2010

ColdFusion is a sever technology that uses CFML (ColdFusion Markup Language) used to dynamically build HTML (and other formats) contentent that is then sent to a web server to be forwarded to the client.

So you do not need ColdFusion on your workstation to edit the plain text CFML if you do not want test the CFML locally.

But when you have the time, a developers version of ColdFusion is free for downloading from the Adobe website and 90% of the time is a straight foward installation process.

HTH

Ian

Participant
March 9, 2010

Thanks Ian - that's a big help.

Just to clarify - is the workflow similar in this instance to editing an HTML file? Could I FTP into the server in a normal fashion, copy the .cfm files to my local system, edit them locally and then push the new file back onto the server?

Just want to be clear - again, it's my first attempt and I apologize for the very simple nature of the question. Still learning.

If this project got serious, I'd get a local developers version in place for local testing. Thanks for the tip on that.

ilssac
Inspiring
March 9, 2010

Yes CFML files are simple text files and they can be FTP'd back and forth like any other text files

Just be careful editing any of the ColdFusion Markup.  Usually HTML like tags that all start with 'CF', I.E. <cfoutput...>, <cfquery...>, or <cfset...> to name a couple of common examples.  A mistake introduced into these tags could cause the page to not run properly and the ColdFusion server is going to display an error message, not the desired output.