Still not working in CS4 commercial distribution. At least it still lets me close out of all open files and test the frameset. But you have to tell it to stop warning you, and test locally. Its a workaround. Testing frames should be possible from all angles.

I am at a loss on wether this should be part of my wish list, or a bug. When setting up a testing server (PHP & MySQL), Dreamweaver does not allow the previewing of Frames with the URL prefix.

Whenever I am teaching about testing servers this really throws the student for a loop. Not only are they trying to wrap their head around the idea of a testing server, but struggling to know why the lights do not turn on. If you press ignore, or publish it fails to add the URL testing Server prefix and the student ends up seeing the plain text instead of the resulting PHP page.

I have yet to understand why the Dw developers do not allow the author to preview frames on a testing server. I imagine because framesets rely on multiple files that would need to be published to the testing server to work, however, isn’t this the role of publishing dependent files?

Workaround
I have found that if you tell Dreamweaver to stop warning you about this you can get the frameset to preview in the web browser. However, you must close out of all open files and preview the file from the Files palette. I think that dreamweaver does not check to see that it is indeed a frameset file if the file has not already been opened.