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I don’t know why I didn’t think of this before.

Dreamweaver templates use the .dwt extension, which means that if you try viewing them through a browser you just see it as text, or it will try to download the file. This means that developing Dreamweaver projects means either creating the original file as a .html file and converting that to a dwt down the road, or creating an .html file that uses the template, and keep updating it. Both options are just a little more work than I think should be required.

I’m running apache, but the principle is the same (albeit slightly different steps) in IIS. I’m also running this on my local computer so I have quick access to httpd.conf, which is apache’s configuration file. On a shared server, I believe this would also work by adding it to a .htaccess file.

It’s easy, just add this line to your apache config file — httpd.conf

AddType text/html .dwt

And that’s it! Restart apache and reload the page. Apache will now describe the file as a text/html file in the header, and your browser will render it as such.