How do I publish my changes back to the live site?

[Werth Sensei]

Hi All:

I'm new to firebug, and WOW, it opens the world to me. I can find
just about everything that I need to find and then change it with my
web authoring software. However, I've found something on my site with
firebug that I need to change that I CAN'T figure out the location of
in my authoring software, so I would like to know after I "test" my
change with firebug how I can then save that tested change directly to
the web site, bypassing my authoring software.

Please let me know and thank you all so much! ( I realize that this
is probably the dumbest question ever, but I have searched quite a few
website and this forum and couldn't find an answer on how to save
changes to my web site with firebug.) Now, I am ready to receive your
instructions so I can see just how dumb I feel right now that I can't
find the "SAVE CHANGES" or "PUBLISH CHANGES" button in firebug. Talk
to you all soon.

Sincerely,

Michael

[Kara Rawson]

No question is a dumb question, only question not asked are dumb. For
starters firebug is a debug utility for javascript and it is also used
for inspecting html / DOM (document object model). Unlike your authoring
software which is that, auhtoring software, it does not publish to your
website or save the file to your file system. Nowadays web pages are a
series of resources located on remote computers, and mashed together
into a single url.

Generally if you want to make some changes and compare it to something
your editor spits out, then that would be called a diff. IE change some
stuff in firebug, copy yoru changes to notepad, save them, then use a
diff program to compare the changes line by line.

if you find yourself using firebug to actually develope your website on,
you are doing something wrong, ytou are using the wrong tool for the
job. Yes firebug has and mimics alot of functions your IDE or authoring
software has, but again its just a debugging utility, meaning its only
mean to peer into what your working on. With that said, maybe tyou
should try using a better authoring program, or learn how to get yours
to do what you want.

hope that helps a little

kara

[HershelSR]

>  However, I've found something on my site with
> firebug that I need to change that I CAN'T figure out the location of
> in my authoring software, so I would like to know after I "test" my
> change with firebug how I can then save that tested change directly to
> the web site, bypassing my authoring software.

Short answer: There is no way to do this using Firebug.

The only way is to directly edit the source files of your website and
make the changes there. Firebug is just to preview the changes, but it
can not and will not change your site.

HTH

[Werth Sensei]

Thank you Kara and Hershel:

Can you query firebug to tell you the FILENAME of the source file that
it is currently drilling into to show you the code? My problem is
that I'm looking at code and no knowing what file to find it in so
that I can edit it.

Thank you so much and talk to you soon.

Sincerely,

Michael

[HershelSR]

> Can you query firebug to tell you the FILENAME of the source file that
> it is currently drilling into to show you the code?  My problem is
> that I'm looking at code and no knowing what file to find it in so
> that I can edit it.

If you are editing CSS then you will see the name of the CSS file in
the upper right hand corner of the CSS selector you are editing. If
you place your mouse on that filename, then a tooltip will come up and
show you the full path to that file as well.

HTH

[Werth Sensei]

Hello Hershel:

I'm highlighting an item on my site, in this case, on our www.mainstma.org
web site, we have some text in the center of the screen that says
"Welcome to the Frontpage". I can't for the life of me figure out
where that text is located.

Firebug shows template.css and black.css as the filenames in the right
window, but "Welcome to the Frontpage" is not within those files. I
can see on the left window the Welcome to the Frontpage text, and I
can modify that to say something else with Firebug, but I can't save
it to the live site, of course.

I am trying to see where in Firebug it will tell me the exact filename
of the text showing in the left window. I just can't find it! I'm
sure if I can figure this out, then I will have a future skill to
apply to other situations where I'm having trouble finding something.

Please let me know what you think! Thank you so much.

Sincerely,

Michael

[Werth Sensei]

Hi Hershel:

I finally found this in my authoring software. While scanning through
the help forums on Joomla, I saw someone with the same problem. They
found it buried under several levels of command parameters. It was a
case of knowing where to look. It happened to be the page title for
the Home menu setting under the main menu for the site. I never would
have guessed that.

Immediate problem solved, however, it would be nice to know if firebug
would be able to tell you the exact file a piece of html text that is
highlighted on the screen is located in. That would solve the problem
of digging through menus.

Thank you again for all your help and talk to you again soon, I hope.

Sincerely,

Michael

[conticreative]

Boy, how I wish all questions where tat simple. The "Welcome to the
frontpage" bit is a Joomla default page title that needs to be changed
in the Joomla administration main menu > home > parameters > Title

Firebug can only help there to locate the title and identifying it as
such but little else.

But as I am writing this I realize you already figured it out.

To answer another question, Firebug had a menu (previous version) that
let you save the css file locally after you made changes. In the newer
version I cannot find this any longer.
However, while before when you went to look at the entire CSS file it
would only display a few lines of code, looks like they fixed that in
the latest version. Only now you cannot save it locally (or I have not
found the place where you can) so it still is useless in that regard.
Another problem I found with Firebug is that if you have a CSS line
item rule already in the CSS file is easy to manipulate, but if you
need to add a new line item rule or god forbid a brand new CSS
statement in the file Firebug doesn't work very well. Ioften I write
the new line of code and soon after it disappear. I have not found a
way to add a new class or ID statement in the css at all. .

For css changes to be saved locally I usually look for something with
Firebug, then I use the web developer toolbar to actually make the CSS
changes and then I save locally in my local site.
However, it's not a really good system and I prefer to use
Dreamweaver.
If anyone is interested, I am writing a book on Dreamweaver, firebug,
firefox and dynamic web development (J. in particular) that explains
the entire set up to very rapidly make these kind of work using those
aligned features in dreamweaver that once upon a time I hated but now
I love because they make my work so much faster. Haven't found a
better way of doing it.

DW is my main "warhorse" and firebug and the web dev toolbar play
support.

What I would like to know is where I can find more resources on
Firebug and Javascript troubleshooting. It is probably the last thing
I need to learn to make my web development truly flawless.
In Joomla I have some sites where the default JS files throw an error,
but when I trace the error with Firebug all I get is a link inside
Mootools or JQuery. There is nothing I can do there.
If anyone has any good tutorials, let me know.

[ColinFine]

On Jul 29, 12:23 am, Werth Sensei <mrwerthsen...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hello Hershel:
>
> I'm highlighting an item on my site, in this case, on ourwww.mainstma.org
> web site, we have some text in the center of the screen that says
> "Welcome to the Frontpage".  I can't for the life of me figure out
> where that text is located.
>

Normally, ALL text in your document comes from the single HTTP fetch
that your browser does: this is why the HTML tab in Firebug does not
have a drop-down to select a file in the way that the CSS and SCRIPT
tabs do. (There are some exceptions: - frames, generated content in
CSS, items inserted in javascript - but I don't think they are
relevant here).

The fact that the content of your page might be generated from a
hundred source and data files is unknown to your browser, and
therefore to Firebug: they are finished with once the server sends
the page to the browser, and their names are unknown. I'm afraid
Firebug - and anything else running in the browser - cannot help you
with this.