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RayRider

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Web Site Management Tool

I used to use years ago Dreamweaver 4.0 to help build web sites. I am out of the development stage these days. However, within Dreamweaver there is a tool called "site Manager". What this tool did was to logon to your web server. As you were changing and adding content on Dreamweaver's PC side, the Site Manager detected what had been modified, added or deleted and made sure the server side was in sync with the PC development side.

Now, I am moving sites around from box to box and was wondering if there was a "stand-alone" tool that could help the syncing of Linux server with the archive side on the PC in the same way as Dreamweaver's Site Manager did without the needing of the web development tools.

I realize I can do this manually by ftp back and forth. I just thought there may be an expensive tool to keep the remote content in sync.
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Paul Sauvé
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RayRider

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Paulsauve:

Your information did not provide me with the tool I am looking for. I am using apache2 on ubuntu. I am not, nor do I think I will be moving to a CMS system in the near future. I am looking at Wordpress at the moment to learn what is involved there. So far, I have been able to simply use Filezilla ftp client to update server files. I pulled out my old Dreamweaver 4.3 to see if it would work on Windows 7 - NO SUCH LUCK!!

Thanks anyway.
Perhaps HTML-Kit-Tools could be what you are looking for.

You can manage projects with this, but not quite like Dreamweaver
You could just upgrade to Dreamweaver CC or find CS5 on eBay.  Those will run on Windows 7 and 8 and probably 10 too and have the same features.

However, within Dreamweaver there is a tool called "site Manager". What this tool did was to logon to your web server. As you were changing and adding content on Dreamweaver's PC side, the Site Manager detected what had been modified, added or deleted and made sure the server side was in sync with the PC development side.

Not exactly correct.  The Site Manager allowed you to define a connection to a remote server and a local folder to host the local site files.  You then used the optional Check-In/Check-Out function to do what you describe above on a file-by-file basis.  You could also set Check-In/Check-Out to also check out/in "related" files which would also download any images or attached scripts but I always found this to be more of a PITA than just grabbing each file I needed to work on.

There was/is also a command to synchronize the sites which would compare local and remote timestamps on files.  You could synch a site up from the local server (all newer files than remote counterparts would upload), or down from remote (the opposite would happen) or do it both ways at once (chaos).  The problem with this command was that if you were a more advanced webmaster and was active in the shell and used grep to batch update files, your timestamps were blown all to heck and a DW synch could actually be quite destructive.  CI/CO was better.

These days, I'm no longer using Dreamweaver for much of anything but the concept of synching files is still around.  Many, many, many developers use version control software to manage things.  Later versions of Dreamweaver would actually integrate with Subversion but nowadays I just use git to edit files from a repository and commit the newer version back when I'm done.  Version Control is superior to DW synchronizing across almost every objective measure except the one that probably matters to you the most: it's not as simple to use.