Q: How do I use my favourite HTML / CSS editor to edit XenForo templates?
A: XenForo exposes a
WebDAV interface to the templates system.
Q: WebD... er, what?
A: WebDAV is a protocol that sits on top of HTTP and allows items on a web server to be treated as files.
Wikipedia definition
Q: How do I use it?
A: To use WebDAV with XenForo, you must connect a WebDAV client to the
admindav.php file on your webserver and provide your XenForo administrator login details.
These are example setup screens from
Adobe Dreamweaver:
And this is the equivalent configuration screen in
CyberDuck:
XenForo must be running in debug mode for the WebDAV connection to be active, and we would recommend that you restrict access to admindav.php through your web server (allowing only your own IP access) and also limit debug mode to your IP address alone, by including code like this in your config.php file:
PHP:
if ($_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'] == '127.0.0.1')
{
$config['debug'] = true;
}
(replacing 127.0.0.1 with your own IP address).
While both Windows and Mac provide their own WebDAV clients, neither is particularly good for this job, and we would recommend that you use a third party tool. The following tools have been extensively tested and shown to work very well:
- Macromedia Dreamweaver (Windows and Mac)
- CyberDuck (Windows and Mac)
- Panic Coda (Mac)
Update June 16 2011 - Cyberduck status updated to reflect the availability of a Windows version.