Dreamweaver, Subdomains, and a local test server

How do I use Site Manager in DW to test my sites locally?

[RKramkowski]

I'm in the process of trying to set up a test server on my local PC with the necessary directory structure to test several different sites (using different technologies). I'm using all the current versions (as of yesterday) of Apache, php, phpBB, Wordpress, and mySQL. I created an "htdocs" directory at the root (I'm running Windows XP). In that directory, I have several subdirectories, one for each site. One is a blog, another a forum, another a static HTML site, and another a portal using RSS feeds and other things. Within the portal directory, I have additional folders for each portal (subdomains, I hope).

My biggest problem with DW so far is that I want to be able to use (and test locally) subdomains. Originally, I created a folder called "products" (http://www.products.com once it's uploaded to my webhost). Within that folder, I created a series of folders that would be subdomains of that domain (cars.products.com, cats.products.com, etc.). But the more I think about it, I think all folders, whether subdomains or not, should be at the same level. After all, that's how subdomains are structured on my webhost when I use CPANEL.

I've tried many different combinations of paths, etc. in setting up a test site with DW's site manager utility but none take me to the test site when I hit F12. I'll either get a 404 error or a message that says that the site cannot be displayed (but not a 404 error).

What am I missing? And I haven't even gotten to using DW for the blog or forum yet. Am I asking too much of the tool?

Thanks,
Bob

[sagerock]

Typically, when I set up a subdomain in cpanel that becomes a folder within my htdocs folder of my domain. I can see the folder when I ftp into the server (I use SmartFTP).

So, in Dreamweaver you are going to want to setup ftp for a subdomain to go into this folder.

It might look something like this:

You ftp into your domain at www.products.com and the main folder of the site is: htdocs
Then each of your subdomains are doing to be like this:

www.products.com/htdocs/cars
www.products.com/htdocs/cats

You will just tell Dreamweaver those are the paths for each of those sites.

In your browser, however, the domains will look like this:
cars.products.com
cats.products.com

Car and cat products combined are quite a niche.