About Project Folders

Folders are the primary means of organizing files in your projects. This section describes the different types of folders and the concepts that you need know to work with them effectively.

There are two distinct folder types:

Physical folders
Virtual folders

Physical folders

Physical folders are directly tied, or mapped, to a directory on your computer.

Virtual folders

Virtual folders function as repositories for files that have no logical relationship to each other on a disk drive. You can think of a virtual folder as a container into which you can place whatever files you want. Virtual folders are a useful way to organize files that can be distributed across your file system.

Manual-inclusive and auto-inclusive physical folders

Physical folders can be divided into auto-inclusive and manual-inclusive.

Manual-inclusive folders require you to specify which files in the mapped directory should be included in the folder. For example, you might have a folder with ten files in it, only three of which are necessary for your Web site. You can create a manual-inclusive folder, add just those three files, and ignore the other seven.
Auto-inclusive folders include every file in the mapped directory by definition. You can specify which file types you would like to include (for example, all the HTML files) but you cannot specify individual files to include. Auto-inclusive folders are automatically updated when you add files to or delete files from the mapped directory.
Changing a folder from auto-inclusive to manual-inclusive retains all files by default.

Note The location of a manual-inclusive folder cannot be changed.

The project file

Both physical and virtual folders point to files in your file system. These pointers, or references, are contained in the project file.

The project file is created and saved (with an apf extension) when you create a new project. As you make changes to your project's contents, the project file is updated automatically. If you rename the project file, the old file is deleted.

The project file is stored in an XML-defined WDDX format. This format can be difficult to read and it is not the ideal location from which to view a list of project files. The VTOM scripting engine functionality is more suited to this task. See Scripting the Visual Tools Object Model in the online Help references for more information on the VTOM scripting engine.

Folder types

The following table shows the icon for each folder type and a description of when you should use each folder type:


Icon	Folder Type	Usage
	Virtual folder	Use when you want to organize files from several different locations into one location.
	Auto-inclusive folder (physical)	Use when you want all the files, or all files of a certain type, in a specific directory to be included in your project.
	Manual-inclusive folder (physical)	Use when you want to select exactly which files, on a file-by-file basis, in a specific directory are included in your project.

Using HomeSite
Chapter 7 Using Projects for Site Management