Dreamweaver: Cloaking Files

Have you ever worked with a really big web site in Dreamweaver that has a number of pages that are buil on a template, and then had to change the template making it essential for all the pages that use the template to be uploaded again? Don't you wish there was a quicker way to upload them without having to either go through and select the documents individually for upload, or just upload the entire web site, images and all other resources included?

Well there is. It's called file cloaking.

What is Cloaking?

No were not talking about what the Klingon Battle Ships do in Star Trek, but the theory is the same. Cloaking files allows you to hide individual or groups of files from any Dreamweaver file operations, such as Get and Put funtions.

So for example, you could tell Dreamweaver to upload the entire web site, but ignore any images it comes across of mp3's etc. This is very handy for when you have a vast number of documents that you need to upload in one go, but do not want to waste time uploading all of the linked images etc as well.

How do You Cloak Files?

Cloaking files in Dreamweaver is easy, but first you must make sure cloaking is enabled on the desired Dreamweaver site. Follow the steps below to enable File Cloaking:

Open your sites properties by going to Dreamweavers 'Site' menu and selecting Edit sites. Select the desired web site from the list of configured sites and click edit.
Select the 'Cloaking' option from the list of sections on the left.
Click the 'Enable File Cloaking' option.

At this point, you can also enter a number of file extensions to automatically cloak. Click on the 'Cloak files ending with' option and enter a number of file extensions that you would like cloaked into the text field. A Common list of files to exclude appears below:

.jpg
.jpeg
.gif
.pdf
.mp3
.zip
.avi
.mpg

Once you are done click ok to rebuild Dreamweavers Site Cache.

Whats Next?

Once you have enabled Cloaking you are ready to go. If you setup automatic cloaking on a list of file extensions above, take a look at your sites files in the Dreamweaver Files panel and notice how the file tyes you selected now have a red cross through them. These means that those particular files are cloaked and will not be retrieved or uploaded to the server during group file operations, such as when you upload the entire web site or a folder.

You can still select individual cloacked files and use the Put and Get Commands, and you can select multiple files and use the Get and Put commands, but this is the only way to use the FTP features on cloaked files. If you tried to Get or Put a folder that contained cloaked items, the cloaked items in that folder would be excluded from the Get/Put operation.

You can also cloak individual files by right clicking on the desiered file, and selecting the cloaking menu from the speed menu that pops up. When that expands, click Cloak File. You can also uncloak an individually cloaked file this way as well.

Things to Remeber

Always remember to turn off Cloaking before you need to update files that are cloked. This will ensure that the remote copy of the site stays up to date with your local copy. Cloaking is only really useful when you need to update a number of HTML documents in a hurry and don't want to eat up bandwidth and time by uploading the entire site, or by spending an hour selecting all the updated files individually.