Best practice - 2 computers - one site.

My G5 desktop (10.4) is where I've always done my development and now I've finally got my MacBook Pro (10.5) enabled through Mamp.
CS4 on both.
All my sites currently reside on my G5 but I want to begin doing much of this work on my laptop.
So. How?
I do have a pair of network drives I could place the workfiles on if that would be advisable. It would allow me to work on the laptop without having to boot the desktop.
And how do I maintain synchronization of the files and would I even need to maintain the site locally on either computer or could they see this network drive as local?
And does the fact that I'm using Mamp (long story) on the laptop complicate matters at all.
And any other conceivable question I may not have, as of yet, thought to ask.

Mick

If you have the network drives, you would be best of using those. Set the Local info tab in your site definition to use the network drive as the path to the local files.

You would need to configure the web servers on both the desktop and the laptop to use the files on the network drive as a virtual directory. I'm not sure on how to configure that in MAMP, but their documentation should cover it.

Thanks Jason

When you say "web servers" I'm assuming you're referring to what DW calls "Testing Server"?
Assuming that I get that all done will the different computers be confused by the changes they see or are they, as I assume, feeding off a common definition of what the site is?

Looking more discreetly at DW's help files I infer that I should place the files on the network drive and in "Remote Info" select "Access: LocalNetwork" and choose the files on my network drive from both (or many) computers.
"Local Info" would point to the same place?
And if so than choosing "Maintain synchronization information" in "Remote Info" would be irrelevant/unnecessary?

So. To sum. As I see it. Local and Remote info would be defined the same on both machines assuming all files are kept on a common network drive and Testing Server would be defined as appropriate for each individual computer.
Yes?

Localtesting will be the same on both computers.


if the network drive is a computer that has a testing server installed on it, you can set the testing server to use the URL to that sserver, other wise, you will need to configure the testing server on the laptop and the testing server on the desktop to use the netork drive as a virtual directory.


A virtual directory is a directory outside of the webserver root that the webserver has been configured to serve.

As an example, on my computer, I have a folder:
c:\websites


all of my sites are in this folder. I have configured my server to use c:\websites as a virtual directory, so it i browse to:
websites


i am now serving pages from c:\websites instead of the usual web root folder.


you could map to the network drive and create ait as a virtual directory in your web server on both computers. If you give the virtual directory the same name in both cases the address:
networkDrive

would map to the same files.


the remote section of the site definition will point through ftp to the live hosts site.