Best way to deal with server side includes in 10-year old website

[Jonibean]

I have a client's site with over 800 articles, originally done in .asp using server-side includes. Recently I updated Dreamweaver to 2018 cc which no longer shows these includes. I've spent several days trying to figure out the best way to deal with this problem. A good portion of each page is built using these, in particular a very long list of stories that uses an extension that creates a tree menu that opens and closes - way too much code to have on every page.

I've figured out a way of doing it with jquery, but I still can't see anything unless I'm in live view, and I have to keep uploading the css over and over to see it. I'm finding it difficult and very slow to work this way.

Would it be better for me to go back to an earlier version of Dreamweaver that allows me to see them (this seems like problems for some future day), or convert the whole site to php so I can use that type of include? Or some other method?

Also, I'm not a coder, I'm a designer, so it can't be too complex.

Thanks for any advice!

[B i r n o u · Accepted solution]

it may be worth trying ... visual code .. no?

Download Visual Studio Code - Mac, Linux, Windows

[Jonibean]

This isn't something I knew about - another program or something in Dreamweaver? I'll investigate. Maybe DW just isn't working properly because I don't seem to be getting that live code edit functionality that I'm seeing on people's youtube videos. I'm still on el Capitan, maybe that's causing an issue...

[Nancy OShea]

Visual Studio is a Microsoft's editor for ASP.net and classic ASP projects.  If you're working in that coding environment, it makes sense to use VS instead of DW.

[B i r n o u]

that is what I have proposed in first message...

[Nancy OShea]

https://forums.adobe.com/people/B+i+r+n+o+u  wrote

that is what I have proposed in first message...

I know you did.  And I expanded on it to answer the question in reply #4.

[Nancy OShea]

Includes have to be parsed by a server.  Do you have a local IIS testing server on your machine?  Did you define your testing server in DW ?

Setting up a local testing server in Dreamweaver

[Jonibean]

I do have a testing server on another host set up, not local. I used to be able to see them right in the dreamweaver view.