Dynamic Sites and Freeway

Building a dynamic Web site in Freeway is easy – possibly easier than if you were going to hand code the whole lot. Freeway can still handle the layout of the site, leaving you (or your PHP buddy) to crunch the code. And with Freeway’s Save as Templates function, you could build a code-ready file, ready to go.

Naming the Page

When building a PHP site in Freeway, don't forget to change the page's file name. It will need the .php extension. You can do this really easily in the Inspector Palette.

Previewing your Site

As PHP needs to be run through a server to work, you can not use Freeway’s built-in preview mode. Instead, you need to activate Personal Web Sharing on your Mac (under Sharing in System Preferences) and install the PHP Module. If you publish the sites folder in your user folder, you can access the site using a URL similar to this:

http://yourmachinename.local/~yourshortusername/

Installing PHP and MySQL

We can’t support the installation and running of PHP or MySQL. However, a couple of useful places to start are:

PHP: Marc Liyanage has some excellent, and very easy to install, PHP modules for Mac OSX. Installing PHP is as simple as running an installer. Find out more from his site

MySQL: Server Logistics provides a MySQL installation that gives you a System Preferences pane to configure passwords, stop and start MySQL etc.. Find out more here