Adding File Extensions to Dreamweaver

Dreamweaver features color coding and language awareness for lots of languages, all built in. Files are associated with a language by file extension, but what if you wanted to add an extension? I recently needed to edit an XML file as an XML file, but it did not have an XML extension, and so Dreamweaver treated it as text only (and would not even open it when clicking on in the Files panel). Some users save ColdFusion files with extensions other than CFM or CFML, and Dreamweaver won't recognize those by default. It took some digging around (and e-mailing the Dreamweaver team) to find out how to add my file extension, and now that I have it working I thought I should share the info in case others want to do the same. So:

1) The list of files that Dreamweaver edits are stored in Configuration\extensions.txt (under the Dreamweaver root). This is a plain text file, and you need to add the extension to two places, the "All Documents" line, and the specific file type line ("XML Files" for my file). Doing this allows you to click on a file in the Files panel so as to edit it.

2) You may have a second copy of this file in the user configuration directory (for example, mine is in C:\Documents and Settings\ben\Application Data\Macromedia\Dreamweaver MX 2004\Configuration), and you'll need to make the same changes to that file.

3) Next, edit file \Configuration\DocumentTypes\MMdocumenttypes.xml (this is the file that associates color coding with file extensions), locate the document type ("XML" in my case), and add the extension to the extension list.

4) And then restart Dreamweaver.

That should do it!