Elgg and integrated development environment for php

Hi! 

I'm new at this and I wanted to know how could I modify my Elgg site in an integrated development environment for php, such as Dreamweaver, Netbeans... I'm trying to open php files with Dreamweaver, for example, xampp\elgg\dashboard\index, but it opens a blank desing page. I've added all the xampp folder to dreamweaver, I've assigned a testing server to it and I've tried "discovering the dynamically-related files" aswell (this last things shows me error). Any idea of what is happening? 

Thanks a lot! :)