I recently had  a cow-orker who was having trouble updating a DWT in Expression web.  While it looked great and the attached pages were correct, any new changes to the DWT were not applied unless she opened the page in Expression and then Updated the Selected page.   We were baffled as our understanding by using a DWT you avoided editing each page if you changed the DWT.  After a bit of scrounging around I found a solution.Read More Below...

With Expression Web (and it’s predecessor FrontPage) you have the ability to edit sites ‘live’.  Either through FrontPage/Sharepoint, WebDAV, or FTP.   This lets you quickly open a site, make a change, save and the change appears.

We had been updating the site live via FrontPage Extensions and working fine but inside of Expression Web it disabled the ability for a dwt to change its related pages.  In addition Updating Selected Pages, and Update All Pages were also disabled.    I can only speculate and make and educated guess that this was to prevent sites from locking up when updating as there is a transparent upload/download of pages during saving.  Having a whole site update via the DWT could make Expression Web freeze and result in support calls and unchangeable sites.

I then published the site via Expression Web to a drive and then was able to update the DWT, Update Selected Pages and Update All pages.  I republished the site and everything was fine.

Is this a bug? Not really, by disabling these types of functions you do reduce the risk of corrupting your site when you do make changes.  I will agree it is a little inconvenient  but I personally edit in a separate area first before publishing my changes live so I had never come across this problem.