Inherited a Joomla site, but only used to HTML and CSS. Is Dreamweaver still an option?

For about 12 years I've been working on a couple different web sites in Dreamweaver or even wayback in Homesite. That said, I've gotten very comfortable with the traditional set up of URLS with definite structures where you can logically follow the directory set-up and it was very clear how to program the relative/absolute links and more. I would either FTP the files through in Dreamweaver or would use some kind of Management Console. Recently I took a new job to help on a web site that currently lives and was built using Joomla. I'm looking to see if there is a way to get this entire site on my Hard Drive so I can work on it locally and then upload as pages are finished, or at开发者_开发问答 the very least find out how best to work with this site.

Joomla has many things about starting a page from scratch, but I'm really trying my best to investigate a site that's already developed and find ways to make the necessary adjustments and take inventory of everything that's on the site. Any help would be much appreciated.

Thanks.

In order to administer a site in Joomla, there is no need to have any files locally. You can add, edit, and delete pages all through the administrative back end of the website. The entire site is built based on the query string of the URL. The string determines which component is displaying the content and which content to display.

There is really only one page in a Joomla site, the index.php file in the current template directory. Every page is built using that page. The only time you would need to modify that page is when there is a structural change in the site. Even then, if the template is well coded it should have various module positions available for use that collapse when they are not in use. This allows you to have a 3 column layout on one page and a 2 column layout on another simply by adjusting which modules display on a particular page.

I would highly recommend reading some tutorials before messing around with editing any files. Here are a few decent resources:

http://www.virtuosimedia.com/dev/php/joomla-administration-explained-a-joomla-15-admin-tutorial

http://www.joomlashack.com/tutorials

http://docs.joomla.org/Beginners

Part of the purpose of Joomla is to be able to manage the content of a website without requiring local copies of all the pages. So what you are asking sort of defeats the purpose of using Joomla in the first place. To do what you ask you would have to get an offline copy of the entire website, uninstall Joomla, and then upload your "static" copy. I would predict that the end result would be a web site that is very hard to maintain.

If you really really want to do this you could use a website copy tool like HTTrack. It supposed to be used to copy a website so you can browse offline, but the end result is what you are looking for: a local copy of the website.