I have inherited a complete mess of a site. I've never really had to clean up another person's bad file structure before, and this is a little intimidating.

Basically, what is the best way to move all of the images (pdfs, etc.) from the root folder into their own respective folders? I was told that just moving the files will allow DW to automatically update all of the links. Is this so? I thought it was only applicable to code files.

I should probably know this by now...

Thanks for any help.

It should work - but you have to do it within the files panel - try creating a new folder - say images, then dragging just one of the images into it, when you drop it you should get an alert telling you which files will be updated and asking you to confirm.

BTW if you are moving the htm files around it might be worth thinking about external incoming links because once you have moved the files any links will fail.

Thanks for the reply!

So, should this work on the remote side? Or do I do it on the local side, and then upload?

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It should work - but you have to do it within the files panel - try creating a new folder - say images, then dragging just one of the images into it, when you drop it you should get an alert telling you which files will be updated and asking you to confirm.

BTW if you are moving the htm files around it might be worth thinking about external incoming links because once you have moved the files any links will fail.
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you would move the files around on your local machine, then DW updates everything on your local site, that does mean that on the server all those old files will still be where they were. You could delete them manually but that's messy.

You can do a synchronise - under the Site menu, that examines the remote site and uploads the new files or gets the newer files, there is also a checkbox in the dialogue so that you can delete files on the remote server that are not present on your local machine.

If this is a production site you need to take care that you get everything right before getting rid of those old files - sorry if that's obvious. I think I would put a tiny image on the pages, something like a 5px square of a pale colour in the top corner so that I could make sure that the new pages were serving corrently, then delete it afterwards. You could do something like that with a find/replace right across the site, or paste it into the code as you moved each file.

Have you thought about using a virtual machine (replica of your web server) and making the changes to the local copy and then uploading to the virtual server first?

That way you can edit all your local files (take a copy) upload them to the virtual server, check that all the pages work, links, pictures, pdfs etc are working. Once your happy, the easiest way would be to then zip the contents on the virtual server - delete the files off of the working server - copy the zip file to the working server (put up a page saying the site is down at the moment for maintenance) - extract the working files into your live server area and then take down the maintenance page and hey presto your site is now back up and running.

The only minimal downtime is the deletion and extraction time of your files which shouldn't take long, plus this will give you extra time to sort out your inherited mess <img src=../images/dmxzone/forum/icon_smile.gif border=0 align=middle>

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