Dreamweaver Is Dying; Long Live Drupal! 318
Barence writes "Here's an interesting blog post by a designer who reckons Dreamweaver is dying. It's not Dreamweaver's fault, though. Nor is the problem Adobe and its development team — the last Dreamweaver CS4 version was the most impressive release in years. Moreover, although Microsoft Expression Web poses a far more credible threat than FrontPage could muster, Dreamweaver remains the best HTML/CSS page-based editor available. The real problem for Dreamweaver and for its users is that the nature of the web is changing dramatically."
Adapt, don't die...and even MS has the solution (Score:5, Insightful)
Even Microsoft already did what had to be done for that. Integrate the tools with the content management system, duh!
Sharepoint Designer is pretty much Expression Web made to modify Sharepoint's dynamically generated pages. Point Sharepoint Designer to a Sharepoint site where you have required permissions, and have fun. All the power of a content management system, all the power of design and web development tool, all at the same place.
Adobe and Dreamweaver are in an even better position for this. They could work with the open source community, and various vendors (like Alfresco), and make Dreamweaver work the same way Sharepoint Designer works, but across a variety of content management system. The idea of something like Drupal and Alfresco with Dreamweaver having the same kind of integration as MOSS and Sharepoint Designer is quite exciting, in my opinion, and has far more potential.
Re:Content Management System is not a design progr (Score:2, Insightful)
Microsoft is dying, long live McDonalds! (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I doing this right? The whole comparing 2 different things?
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:5, Insightful)
Troll? Why is this a Troll? People who actually know what they do don't need hand-holding. I agree: Gimp, Vim and Firebug is all one needs. (Add in a bit Inkscape too)
A designer might need Dreamweaver, but that's most likely because he doesn't know the underlying structures. Now, I admit, the Designer-Tech profile is quite seldom though ;-))
The concept is more generic (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Content Management System is not a design progr (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, developer has utmost freedom to redesign theme from scratch or mod currently available ones, here are some websites done in drupal, check it out:
more here [buytaert.net] and here [drupal.org].
I completely agree however, drupal != dreamweaver.
First the Concept, then the Security (Score:3, Insightful)
The parent is correct, this is a static vs. dynamic web transition. I suppose "DREAMWEAVER is DEAD" is catchier.
Now, if we can just get ahead of the game on plugging those CMS security holes.
Not really arguing, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
From the blog post:
The bottom line is that the old model of the central webmaster hand-spinning every page of every website and, worse, manually adding the navigation necessary to help users find it, just isnâ(TM)t scalable or viable. The only feasible course for the future is for content to be posted by the content contributor, whether thatâ(TM)s the site owner or site visitors, and for the best possible navigation to be constructed around that content on the fly.
This particular paragraph leads me to think the author has never actually used Dreamweaver - he certainly doesn't even understand the fundamental concept of "templates". I mean, who is manually adding navigation to a large site on a page by page basis?
Thing is, there are a lot of circumstances where "Web 2.0", in the limited sense the author seems to understand (that is, end-users providing added content), doesn't do much for you. There are only a few places on your typical corporate or government web site, for example, where this would make sense. Certainly there are specific applications where this would be handy; but they're fairly narrow and can be handled well by adding some wiki software alongside the "mainstream" website.
Now the tools of Web 2.0 - e.g. dynamic, javascript-driven pages with sql backends - are a different matter. But really Dreamweaver-style templating works just fine with those, IMHO, to the degree one is going to use any tool to make those pages anyway (meaning there's a significant amount of hand-coding happening with the page-specific content).
Personally speaking, I've found Dreamweaver templates (that I've put together) very handy when combined with Contribute. Really the templating is mostly what I use it for; both for allowing other staff to easily maintain content and letting me easily push section-wide and/or site-wide changes to our several-thousand-page web site (templates can be nested, which is quite handy). I know I'm only using a fairly restricted subset of what all Dreamweaver can do; but it does that pretty darn well. Certainly other software can also do this - but I haven't seen anything that works quite as well in all regards.
Re:Content Management System is not a design progr (Score:5, Insightful)
CMS is just a fancy way of saying, "Keep the secretaries out of the friggin' HTML because they always screw it up." Handing Dreamweaver over to someone with no experience was always a joke.
Dreamweaver code sucks (Score:2, Insightful)
wysiwyg was always destined to die (Score:4, Insightful)
What a spam article! (Score:2, Insightful)
Yes, it's true we web-designers can (and generally) do use simple code editors to write our pages, templates and CSS stylesheets; the fact is that there is an ever-growing population of people who want to make their own website, not just pre-compiled garbage templates that Drupal users install- but real personal templates made by the site owners themselves... in order to do that they need a good editor that HELPS them- Dreamweaver does that.
Also, seriously, WTF does Drupal have to do with it? Sure, I'm not knocking Drupal I've used it on some projects, but it has nothing to do with the REAL tools required to do a job (mainly a brain, fingers, and motivation).
I hand code (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Microsoft is dying, long live McDonalds! (Score:5, Insightful)
It's not even a static/dynamic difference. Dreamweaver is a website design tool, Drupal is a website management tool. A smart person would use both; design the look & feel with Dreamweaver, then convert the design into a Drupal template.
Re:Good riddance. (Score:1, Insightful)
This is the classic software tools for a programmer concerned with job security. Cobble together some text mode software designed for the age of teletypes and brag about how clever you are to make it work (sometimes). These are the first resumes I toss when they cross my desk.
No business messing with the web? Bite Me (Score:5, Insightful)
This just in (Score:4, Insightful)
Architects no longer needed due to rise in demand for modular homes.
Ridiculous, right? My point exactly.
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:5, Insightful)
I agree with you. There are web developers, and web amateurs. You can see them whining and bitching above.
They think that because they read a HTML book while driving the cab, and wrote 5-liners of JavaScript that you can replace with 10 characters of CSS, that they can call themselves "developers".
And because they live in groups, where everybody is like them, they think this is perfectly OK.
I saw companies where a group of 30 web "developers" decided to call functions a too abstract concept for a 16 million page-views PER DAY site! I saw people editing messy PHP/HTML-pages in Dreamweaver, with the *mouse only*. I saw so much server-side code copypasta inside million-dollar-business websites, that it make would someone at a real software company scream until the end of his life.
No structure, no grasp of basic concepts of engineering, no anything. And when the re-design came, it took them full two weeks including overtime, to change all their code everywhere. While I went home in the middle of the first day, after changing my master-templates. They wanted me to help out. But asked if my simple regular expressions would pose any danger (they thought it was black magic). And they got angry, when I replaced their thousand copies of the content box HTML with function calls to the template.
They needed nearly two years, to cope with it, until they implemented a bad version of it Europe-wide. Of course by then, I was so far in front of them, that it again was black magic to them (I started to program client-side web application clients -- What you would call AJAX today.)
I later realized, that such types only get their jobs, because their bosses are such types too. Up to the owner of the company. Which is the only person of the company in many cases.
And then they only have to live up to the clients' expectations. Of course the client never knows, that you could save him 90% of the cash by actually using real programming concepts like re-usability and modularity.
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:3, Insightful)
I had heard Dreamweaver was something interesting but I've found Dreamweaver to be remarkably sluggish and its regular expression support was lacking which surprised and aggravated me (given how many excellent non-copylefted free software regular expression libraries there are). Is most of Dreamweaver written in some interpreted language like Javascript? Also, it made no sense to me why I couldn't use any means of access, like SFTP, for both "local" and "remote" site definitions (or whatever they're called). I didn't get why I couldn't have as many site definitions as I wished and call them all what I wished. I'd much prefer to not have to export something via SMB or whatever protocol MacOS X allows (and last I looked it didn't let you use SFTP via the Finder's Go->Connect to Server... panel) just so one could edit a website synchronizing between two networked locations (one for testing, one for production). Dreamweaver only allowed one site definition ("remote" if I recall correctly) to use SFTP, not both "local" and "remote" and this seemed silly to me. Perhaps I missed a configuration detail but overall I was unimpressed and I ended up using SSI with far better free software text editors to edit the mostly static (X)HTML+CSS websites which are common in academia (meeting site needs and practically addressing website updater laborers). Then, from an admin perspective, knowing it came from Adobe (which is apparently quite slow with their security patches and has annoying licensing), is proprietary, and costly I found it significantly less than practical or attractive. My experience with Dreamweaver was simply not that good. Comparing Dreamweaver and Drupal, on the other hand, seems silly in an entirely different way as there is so much uncommon ground between what they can accomplish, and Drupal has plenty of annoyances all its own.
Re:wysiwyg was always destined to die (Score:4, Insightful)
Dreamweaver always had a very powerful HTML/CSS code editing mode. All people that I knew who used it professionally always worked in that mode, and only occasionally used the "WYSIWYG" mode as a quick preview.
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:4, Insightful)
I suppose it was marked troll because Dreamweaver is a full graphical IDE with drag and drop operations, and if I'm not mistaken, code completion, at the very least. VIM is a text editor -- a very good one -- but still a text editor. Just asking the question presupposes that VIM is somehow an equal if not more preferable website (not just page) development tool... I guess.
In any case, a designer doesn't use Dreamweaver because he doesn't know the underlying structures; he does it in order to visually create the page in a quick and efficient manner. And since most web designers are visual artists, Dreamweaver (which can also do code view) gives the designer a more native perspective on design. I prefer scripting using a text editor, doing no positioning in my HTML source and using a healthy amount of IDs, classes, and divs; but I'm clearly would not be considered a web "designer"
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't see why you'd need CMYK for the web...
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:5, Insightful)
If you're using vim and writing html by hand, then as a web developer you don't know what you're doing. You don't know what tools you could use that up your productivity a great deal.
You may as well say you can write applications by rubbing the hard drive platter with magnets. It could get the job done, but there are better higher level tools that allow you to actually get more of your job done.
And before you say "I can hand code HTML better than a web monkey in dreamweaver can assemble it", just how fast would you be if you learned to use something like dreamweaver and applied yourself to it?
Re:Good riddance. (Score:2, Insightful)
I've seen some of the HTML these tools (Frontweaver, Dreampage, HotMetal, etc) produce, and I Do Not Want It.
Nobody's forcing you to use their WYSIWYG view - if I see any WYSIWYG HTML editor, I know that it's going to produce spaghetti HTML.
However, Dreamweaver is also a very nice HTML/CSS IDE, with code-completion, one-button validation/cross-browser issue reporting, etc etc.
Now, you might ask, why do you need a $400 HTML IDE, when there are many available for free? Well, the simple answer is if you want Photshop, Illustrator and Flash, you have to buy an Adobe suite, and it comes bundled with Dreamweaver.
In terms of keeping all the pages on a site updated with side-wide changes, I mostly use a combination of keyboard macros, custom elisp, Perl, regular expressions, chewing gum, and bailing wire. But it works, and it works the way I *want* it to work.
It's only human (or rather, Geek), to try and build everything on your own. And I agree, web sites are not inherently a complex task. But it's a boring, repetitive task, with lots of security/performance gotchas.
If you make a lot of web sites (even >1 per year), you should really try Drupal. It saves lots of time, and it's really extensible/customizable - it's kinda like the Emacs of the CMS world.
As far as Drupal, though, I thought that was a CMS. Do people really try to use it as an HTML editor? Ugh.
Of course not. It's not "Ugh", it's just impossible. Drupal doesn't come with any WYSIWYG HTML editors.
The point of the article is that since pages are generated using server side technologies (which is, they claim, a revolutionary Web 2.0 idea), you don't need to write your own HTML evar again!!!11one
Usually, I would've said RTFA, but in this case, the FA is clueless horseshit with a trollish title.
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:2, Insightful)
Sorry, but that's bullshit. CSS is not the least bit necessary to make a website, well-formed or otherwise. It's nice to have, if done correctly, but it's certainly not a core part of anything. If you have a website that simply does not work at all without CSS, then you have problems, my friend. Learn to code proper HTML, first, before throwing in CSS.
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:3, Insightful)
Part of this is a problem that somehow has become ingrained somewhere at the business management/accounting or HR level in the corporate world.
It's the "Peter Principle". Read the book. I had years to study it, and this is definitely exactly it.
In other words: Those businesses grow too fast, and put people with a small skillset into higher positions with a completely different skillset, who then hire other people with an even smaller skillset skillset. And so on. Until the ex-web-catalog-link-collector becomes the head of the content and development department. With ex-history-students as html-writers (called "developers") under him. ^^
Been there, seen that.
Wait a second. (Score:3, Insightful)
Are you really comparing Dreamweaver with Drupal? My God. Some poor schmuck is now ditching Dreamweaver and installing Drupal 7.x ( it is the latest so it must be the greatest ) wondering why they need to know their mySQL login credentials for a replacement to DW. Oi.