I put a challenge out there a few weeks ago, and it was not met. I however, stumbled on it myself.

I was trying to “get” an entire site to my local hard drive, but didn’t need to download any of the images, or any of the temp files… and so on. I gave up, scrapped my original plan, and had to come up with a new one. I wish I had found this before…

“Cloaking”, in Dreamweaver, allows you to exclude certain files and folders, and even file types, from all site operations.  It was right there, right in front of my face, the entire time. If you want to exclude a certain folder, or a certain file from normal site operations, just right click on it in the file view, select cloaking, and click “Cloak”. Done. It will be ignored.

In your “Site Options”, you have the option to specify certain file types to always cloak. (You can specifically allow certain files and folders later). Make sure you’re in the advanced view, and on the left hand side is a menu for Cloaking.

Thats it. It is something so easy, that I didn’t look right in front of my face, and instead went scouring over the internet trying to find a plugin, or some trick, or some separate program… It wasn’t talked about, because apparently nobody else on the internet is quite as blind as myself.

Touchè, internets.

Tags: dreamweaver, ftp, tips