Viewing PHP file created by Dreamweaver CS3 in a web browser locally

Hi all,

This is my first post and I'm a total novice with this query.

I've developed a website in Dreamweaver CS3 where all of my pages are PHP. For the last two days I have been able to view the pages locally using the "view in browser" button and selecting Firefox. If I tried to use Internet Explorer I would get a pop-up saying "Do I want to open or save this file", the file being the page I've tried to view, index.php for example. However, Firefox, just opened the PHP file as if it were an ordinary HTML file.

However, all of a sudden without any warning I can no longer view the pages in Firefox. When I try I get the "what do you want to open the file with?" and if I select Firefox I just get a blank page!

I don't have any testing sites set up or have Apache installed or any other server based software for that matter.

Is there any reason why this would just start happening?

Hope you can help.

Regards,

Rich

Because you just started naming your pages .php and used to name them .html? That is my guess, but really there isn't enough information to properly diagnose this problem.

Sorry Ray,

I wasn't perhaps very clear.

The pages were all created from new i.e. file --> new ..> PHP All the pages were bonefide PHP files and I was able to view the pages locally. But now when I try to view the PHP pages I get the pop-up asking if I want to open the file "index.php" where before it would just open in Firefox and display as you would expect.

I didn't rename the HTML files to PHP. I was just using how you would view HTML files in Dreamweaver as an example.

Thanks again.

Since PHP is a web server language, you will get the best results if you view the pages using a web server running PHP. As a temporary fix, you could just rename your files with the .html extension if you aren't actually using any server side code.

Thank you Justin for the reply.

Can I ask a stupid question please.

When I upload my PHP files to a web server running PHP, should the pages display as you would expect automatically. What I mean is, will the server automatically see that my web pages have the PHP extension and therefore run the relevant scripts to see the pages as intended.

Sorry PHP is a new animal for me.

Regards

Yes, if the web server running PHP is setup correctly .php files will run the relevant scripts like you would expect.

Hi Rich,

If you are on a PC, you should install WAMP, its free and will allow you to view your PHP pages as they are meant to be.

The reason that some of your php pages were viewable and some not may be due to the fact that your early php pages may not have contained any actual php code. Just regular html?

If you eventually upgrade to CS4 then you would no longer need WAMP as the new Live View in CS4 will do the same thing.

Brad

Originally Said By: Brad Lawryk

  If you eventually upgrade to CS4 then you would no longer need WAMP as the new Live View in CS4 will do the same thing.  

To the best of my knowledge, CS4 doesn't include a web server or PHP parser. I don't think Live View in CS4 would allow you to preview PHP pages without wamp installed.

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Well my message is similar to ResB...Before I started using (example.php) I usualy use (.html) for my file names. While using the .html way, I was still able to preview my work on the browser when executing F12. After getting into PHP & MySQL, using the (.php) format everthing went down south for me...I cannot preview anything now when clicking on F12...