Unable to view php files in Design View?

[Kanjan]

Need help! I cannot select design view when working with a PHP document, the DesignView option is disabled?

My information.

-          Dreamweaver CS5

-          Mac OSX 10.6 snow Lepoard

I have searched online and I also went through the FAQ but couldn’t find anything relating to this particular issue and my Professor at school said that I need to contact Adobe directly as design view should always be available but all that I would see in Design View are the HTML elements within the PHP file.

The Design View button is disabled, I can not click on it all and so for my class assignments. I have to copy the PHP code into a new HTML document and only then am I able to view the html/php and edit the HTML elements, and then copy and paste it back into the PHP file once I have the html elements/design set up correctly.

I did a similar “Set up PHP for Mac OS X – MAMP” to the version available here, could I have set this up incorrectly and that is why Design View is disabled?

Thanks I appreciate your guys expertise and any help!

[David_Powers · Accepted solution]

Kanjan wrote:

Need help! I cannot select design view when working with a PHP document, the DesignView option is disabled?

Go to Dreamweaver > Preferences, and select File Types / Editors from the Category list on the left. Make sure that .php is NOT listed among the filename extensions in "Open in code view".

Adding a filename extension to that list prevents files from being opened in Design view.

[cwhazzoo]

Make sure your PHP document has some visual elements to display. Sometimes when I dont have any html in a php document it wont let me select design view.