I’m new to Rapidweaver. I’ve built a nice website for a friend using RW and Stacks. When I use the Preview page function on the Rapidweaver tool bar it looks great, however I have two issues:
when I try to publish to a local folder the publishing function has only worked once and the files it produced won’t open in any browser. Same issue when I export. I’ve been able only to open the index page and it has lost all of its formatting. I’ve uploaded the only site I could get to publish locally to my host site and it won’t open in any browser either.
The other issue is that the ftp publish function won’t upload to my host at Plesk. I’ve had to you the file upload function on the Plesk desktop to accomplish this. And as I referenced prior, the site won’t open. Any help would be great. Just spent over an hour on the phone with Godaddy support and it doesn’t seem to be on their end.
I don’t think this is something which can be solved without someone looking at your RW project. It could be something as simple as that you have assigned several index.html (or .php) pages to the same folder/directory.
I use GoDaddy but their online support is not great, you will have to depend on yourself and the help here. You can find info in the GoDaddy support postings but that was confusing for me when starting.
First, publishing to a local folder should be simple and reproducible. Post a screen shot of your settings. That would be a good start.
I did find a conflict in the site directory with a contact form that was in .php instead of .html. I just removed this page. Thanks for that advice Peter! Now I can get the home index page to open properly if I navigate directly to it but it just opens the directory(s) where each subpage is located and then I have to click the index page link within that folder to get the page launched. Then it looks fine.
Most likely, the contact form page requires PHP to work. You probably should have deleted the HTML version. Just publish or export again to get it back.
What happens is RW defaults to using HTML extensions. If a page type (or stack) requires PHP, then RW will change the page’s extension to PHP. RW does not delete files from export folders or web servers, so you end up with both files (HTML and PHP).
PHP files include code that runs on the web server itself instead of only in a web browser. Without that code running, things like contact forms won’t work.
Web pages are designed to be severed by a web server. You can’t expect a folder on your Mac to work just by opening up a folder and browsing it with Safari.
Web servers will take the PHP and make it usable by the browser. Web servers also make thinks like tidy links (Navigation) work.
If you want to test your pages prior to putting them on the host then get and install MAMP. It runs web server (Apache), PHP, and MySQL locally on your Mac.