TOOLS>INSERT>TEMPLATES Stopped Working

​@Paul357825246hll … Try a quick practical check.

Open one of your existing pages that was already based on the template and look near the top of the source code. You may see something like:

<!-- InstanceBegin template="/Templates/something.dwt" ... -->

That line tells you which template file Dreamweaver expects and where it expects to find it.

Then, on the external drive, search for:

.dwt

If you find the .dwt file but it is not inside the site’s Templates folder, put the whole Templates folder back at the root of the site.

The structure should be something like:

SiteFolder/Templates/your-template.dwt

Also make sure the folder is named Templates, not Template, templates, or moved inside another folder by mistake.

If the .dwt files are not on the external drive at all, then they did not move with the site. Existing child pages can still exist, but Dreamweaver cannot create new pages from a template file that is no longer there.

So I would check in this order:

1. Is the Dreamweaver site definition pointing to the new root folder?
2. Is there a Templates folder directly inside that root folder?
3. Are the .dwt files inside it?
4. In Dreamweaver, open the Assets panel, select the Templates tab, then use the small panel menu and choose Recreate Site List.
5. If the templates appear again, try creating the new page from File > New > Site Templates.
6. If they still do not appear, close and reopen Dreamweaver, then check the site definition again.

The external drive itself is probably not the main problem if you can edit the pages. Here in the studio we work almost exclusively from external drives, and even from Synology volumes, without particular problems.

Most likely Dreamweaver just lost the relationship between the site definition and the site’s template folder during the move, or its internal template list simply needs to be rebuilt.

​@Jon Fritz’s suggestion is probably the first thing to verify.

Dreamweaver templates are not only a menu option. They are files, normally stored in a folder named Templates at the root of the defined site. For example:

your-site-folder/Templates/main.dwt

So after moving the site to the external drive, I would check two things:

1. In Site > Manage Sites, make sure the Local Site Folder points to the actual root folder of the site on the external drive, not just to a folder you browsed to from the Files panel.
2. In the Files panel, once the site is correctly selected, check whether you can see a Templates folder at the top level of the site, and whether it contains one or more .dwt files.

If the Templates folder is missing from the external drive, then the template files were probably not copied with the rest of the site. In that case, you would need to copy the Templates folder from the original internal drive, from a backup, or from another copy of the site.

​@Nancy OShea’s method using File > New > Site Templates is the correct way to create a new page from an existing site template. But that list will only be populated if Dreamweaver can see the templates inside the currently defined site.

So the issue is probably not the menu itself. It is more likely that Dreamweaver no longer sees the moved site as the same defined site, or the Templates folder was not included in the move.

Did you update your site’s root folder to the new location in your Site Definition, or did you maybe just browse to the new folder within the Files window?

To update the root folder in the Site Definition…

1. Go to Site > Manage Sites
2. Click your site to highlight it and hit the edit button (pencil icon)
3. With Site selected in the side bar, click the browse button (folder icon) next to Local Site Folder 
4. Browse to the new location and click Save

If you had simply browsed to the new folder from within the Files window, DW won’t use the site’s Templates folder to populate the Template features of the program.

Assuming your local site folder is properly defined...

Site > New Site, type a site name, and select the folder on your computer where your website files live.

Go to File > New >

Column 1: Site Templates 

Column 2: Choose the Site

Column 3: Choose the Template

Hit CREATE button. 

This will spawn a new child page based on your selected site template. 

Hope that helps.