Exporting your site
The Export dialog
When you export your site, what you are asking RapidWeaver to do is to actually build the whole site, just as it will appear on the server when uploaded, and then put it in a folder on your hard disk. This is by no means essential; you can make a whole site of many pages and upload it successfully to the server all without exporting at all. When you Publish your site, RapidWeaver exports it direct to the server, not to your hard disk, and it’s automatically part of the Publish process; you don’t have to do it yourself.
But you certainly can do it yourself, and it can be useful. For instance, when you preview your site in a browser, all that gets ‘built’ is the page you’re previewing. So if you click a link on the page you’re previewing in the browser, you’ll get a ‘Page not found’ message; that’s because the other pages don’t exist yet. Exporting forces those other pages to exist, and in the RapidWeaver preferences, you can have RapidWeaver automatically load the site into a browser of your choice after Export.
RapidWeaver Preferences
You can set the RapidWeaver Prererences as in this screenshot; setting ‘Delete current folder’ is good, because it means that every time you Export, RapidWeaver will delete the whole previous Export folder and replace it with a new one. So if you make a few changes and then Export again, you know that RapidWeaver has exported a whole new site, not just the changes you made. ‘Preview using Safari’ is good; that turns on automatic previewing: whenever you Export, your entire site will be loaded into Safari and displayed. Doesn’t have to be Safari of course; you can choose any browser you have installed on your machine.
Exporting has other uses; if, for instance, you have trouble uploading with RapidWeaver’s built-in FTP, you can export the site and use Cyberduck or another FTP application to upload the contents of the Export folder to your server. Only the contents, mind, not the Export folder itself.
Something else you can do via Exporting is burn the whole site to a DVD in order to send it to a client, or use it as a presentation, as the whole site, with all links intact and working, all images and text, is in that Export folder; it’s a mirror of what’s on the server.
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