CS5.5 and WordPress Multisite

Question

So, I upgraded from my CS4 to CS5.5 last week.  I've extremely excited about the Live View / Inspector aspect of editing my php and WordPress projects.  I'm running this on a suped up win 7 box.  I deleted/uninstalled my old xampp setup and downloaded a new one.  I'm going to have a Solr search engine for a WordPress Multisite blog/directory when I'm all done.  So, I spent the time to also set up tomcat and get an instance of Solr running on my local machine.  (not that this is important, but shows I'm not a complete beginner).
I've followed the tutorials on setting up WordPress to be able to do the testing server, live view and editing.  Everything works fine on a new single blog install (I started a brand new one just to check and to do the Lynda.com tutorials, which are working just fine.)  But, when I go to the Multisite Sub-Blog and set up the discovery of the related links DW gives me a whopping 4 files that are linked.  I can follow the links on the live view pages, but the dynamic linking files are not showing up in the top toolbar?  I can't jump over to the header.php file and then back to the index.php file, because they are not finding all of the linking php files.
As, I mentioned, it's a multisite only problem, becuase it's working on a single blog install just fine.  I thought maybe it was because of the addressing, the testing folder was different from the root website.  So, I edited the vhosts.conf file and hosts file to add a specific testing domain name and there was no change except that I don't get the error anymore when I set up the testing server that the site url of "/" doesn't match the one I had that was "/mydirectory/".
This was an older site that was set up in Dreamweaver that I just kept changing all of the local testing environment stuff, but the link to the remote server was still active.  So, I thought that might be causing the trouble because it was going out to that server to try to follow some of the dynamically linked pages.  So, I completely deleted everything and started over with a fresh Site with just the Testing server set up, fresh wordpress, fresh evreything.  I am able to discover the related links in the file right up to when I turn on multisite in a sub-directory install and the whole discovery of related links wigs out.
If you look at the http://codex.wordpress.org/Create_A_Network I checked the dynamic links at each step.  It worked turning on Multisite and going to network setup, but as soon as I entered the code in the wp-config.php file for defining a multisite and added the .htaccess file then the whole thing breaks.
I'm sure it has to do with how the path is loaded somehow dynamically, but as many people that there are running this combo, of Dreamweaver 5.5 and trying to work on Wordpress, and maybe a Multisite install since it's so much easier in 3.0+ I was surprised that there was nothing on the web about this issue.
Thanks for any help upfront.
Jerry

Answer 1

The WordPress Multisite does use mod rewrite in .htaccess. The contents of that are found in the link I provided on setting up a WordPress Multisite install found at WordPress.org.  As each of the sub-blogs require the use of elements and data from the main site and structure to draw the pages I do not think that setting up each sub-blog as it’s own site definition would work.  It would still have issues finding the relating files.  I guess, if someone figured out how to use Dreamweaver on a blog hosted at wordpress.com to edit themes and such that would probably flow to solving this issue as well.
Since this is on a Development XAMPP server on my own machine, if I put the .htaccess code in my httpd.conf file instead would that make a difference?  Or is it the mod rewrite that is the issue no matter where it resides?
I basically decided to set up each sub-blog as a completely separate “site” for now since all I’m sync’ing is the theme folders anyways at that point and all I was truly after was the Live View / Inspector for making the layout changes.  When I did that though and activated all the plugins that I’m using I noticed some issues with file discovery as well.  I saw in one of the tutorials that there was a way to link a style.css file manually for “design” prior to uploading the site.  Is there anything inside of Dreamweaver that would allow us to manually add the necessary php file for the finder.  I’m pretty sure that it’s getting stuck at the line that is saying (dirname(__FILE__) . “wp-load.php” or something like that (off the top of my head).  Once that relative file would be found my guess is that it would discover all the other ones?  Or there is an issue with the ABSPATH variable being set early on in the WordPress installation.
At this point I’ve tried a dozen different ways to get this to work and it’s obviously broken.  Since it’s so prevalent (I think a lot of the posts I read had this also as a multisite drupal/joomla issue as well) that it would be something worth figuring out how to provide a work around.
Jerry