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The Internet GUI Software

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."
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Dreamweaver Is Dying; Long Live Drupal!

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  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:22PM (#27099563)
    I highly doubt this, I check NetCraft daily, and I've seen NO confirmation of Dreamweaver dying!
  • Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:5, Interesting)

    by siDDis ( 961791 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:27PM (#27099615)

    I've never tried it, when I do web design I do it with Gimp, Vim and Firebug. And I think that combo works great!

    How do Dreamweaver compare to Vim? Is it advanced enough to not fool users to use css styled text for strong expressions?

    • by Corporate Troll ( 537873 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:39PM (#27099767) Homepage Journal

      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 ;-))

      • by pwizard2 ( 920421 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @07:21PM (#27100281)
        I'm quite partial to Bluefish [openoffice.nl] myself for web development work.
      • by Ihmhi ( 1206036 ) <i_have_mental_health_issues@yahoo.com> on Friday March 06, 2009 @08:05PM (#27100693)

        I use Notepad, MS Paint, and my browser to do my web design.

        Now get off my lawn you hooligans!

      • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

        Emacs, Firebug, and Inkscape myself, but the point is well met.

        Ok, honestly, I do resort to Photoshop if available. Illustrator also has some better pieces than Inkscape (though Inkscape's basic UI is far better, it does get a little bogged down on the complex stuff.)

      • I think that more and more (good) web designers are now doing a lot more hand coding. I also think that a lot of people have less reason to upgrade their tools. Especially at adobe's pricing. Freelancers who aren't doing flash have pretty much ignored CS4, at least from my own impressions. I personally prefer expression web, but I don't do WYSIWYG, I hand-write my markup.
      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by mattwarden ( 699984 )

        How can you admit productivity gains from Firebug, yet ignore productivity gains given by integrated development environments?

      • by weston ( 16146 ) <westonsd.canncentral@org> on Friday March 06, 2009 @09:49PM (#27101521) Homepage

        A designer might need Dreamweaver

        Anyone doing design (artwork rather than page layout) isn't going to use Dreamweaver. It's great as a WYSIWYG html editor. From a design standpoint, it doesn't do much else. No raster or vector creation (unless you've decided to try the Celik CSS polygon method).

        The only people I know who still use it are coders who find the extra features it provides in terms of editing and site management useful. In this sense, the article is quite correct -- Drupal and Wordpress and other software are eating away at the market that used to see Dreamweaver as the option for editing webpages without knowing HTML. Now CMSs do that.

        Given that Dreamweaver really isn't a design tool either, usefulness as an IDE is pretty much the last thing Dreamweaver really has going for it.

        • The other thing is that Wordpress etc either are or could be standards compliant. When was the last time Dreamweaver gave you standards compliant code (Actually, as a slashdot user, you probably never used Dreamweaver. I did once (for school, mandatory, but they taught us HTML too.).)?

          • by weston ( 16146 ) <westonsd.canncentral@org> on Friday March 06, 2009 @10:56PM (#27101929) Homepage

            When was the last time Dreamweaver gave you standards compliant code (Actually, as a slashdot user, you probably never used Dreamweaver

            You might be surprised. I definitely prefer Vim myself, but at my last full-time job, most of the other coders used Dreamweaver and periodically, I'd fire it up... either because I found myself doing something where it was kindof nice to be able to interact with the page visually, or just to understand what the other guys liked about it as a tool and how they used it.

            To my surprise, at least with Dreamweaver 8, the code was pretty standards compliant. You could set which doctype you wanted for your (X)HTML, CSS support was decent, and could set it to warn you if you did something that violated the standard. Heck, I think you could actually even set it up to validate arbitrary XML documents.

            There were some other nice features. It's sortof nice having an integrated FTP client to save you a trip to another app, the sitewide search and replace function was certainly a little friendlier/convenient than some of the unixy ways, "clean up word html"...

            I don't miss it all that much myself, but honestly, I can see why some coders see it as a good tool to work in. Maybe that'll be enough to save it as a product.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by FLEB ( 312391 )

          I used to use DW (MX from '00-- small company, wouldn't spring for the upgrade) at work, and never touched the WYSIWYG view. The biggest advantage I've seen to DW is that it has a very good pre-generated template language. It allows you to do the sort of template-based sites with reusable snippets that you'd normally use (CMS/PHP/CGI/etc.) for, but allows you to generate them into static HTML files that require no special server-side technology to operate.

      • by SoupIsGoodFood_42 ( 521389 ) on Saturday March 07, 2009 @12:05AM (#27102311)

        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 ;-))

        All the good web designers I know do their own HTML and CSS. Although in bigger places, the design and implementation in to code may be split. But Dreamweaver has been dead for a while to most decent web designers.

      • by Keen Anthony ( 762006 ) on Saturday March 07, 2009 @01:15AM (#27102611)

        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"

      • by Fross ( 83754 ) on Saturday March 07, 2009 @06:57AM (#27103673)

        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?

    • by JCSoRocks ( 1142053 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:51PM (#27099941)
      Dreamweaver is a great tool. I've been using it almost since it came out. (It and Future Splash, a.k.a Flash.) I've never used the "designer" type tools in dreamweaver. I've always seen it as a really powerful development environment for building sites. The Site concept and integrated FTP / server management are great. Code hints are obviously convenient and I've always appreciated how granular the code coloring / formatting is. The CSS tools are invaluable for tracking down those times when things are cascading a bit differently than you'd like. I'm also a huge fan of the search / replace tools in Dreamweaver for refactoring. The ability to scan across a selection, open document, all open documents, or an entire site is really handy. I realize text editors have similar abilities but the Site concept makes scanning across countless directories a no-brainer.

      There's gobs more but those are the first things that come to mind.
      • Re: (Score:3, Insightful)

        by jbn-o ( 555068 )

        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 calle

      • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

        by S-100 ( 1295224 )
        I've used Dreamweaver for a few years, and I've found it's a great tool as long as you don't get too attached to the WYSIWYG mode and its automatic style sheet generation. WYSIWYG editing generally creates horribly wrong HTML, and the automatic style sheet generation works as long as you change your style thinking from CSS to Dreamweaver's proprietary methods.
    • by SocialEngineer ( 673690 ) <invertedpandaNO@SPAMgmail.com> on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:53PM (#27099969) Homepage

      Since we've got licenses for it at my day job, I use it as my preferred webdev/design IDE. It works fairly well for that sort of thing, but it's a bit of overkill for me (I'm not working on collab projects). Of course, I hand code everything. I'll say this much; it's a fast, responsive IDE regarding its UI, code highlighting, and more. When I'm doing my independent work, though, I usually use Geany for my coding, since it's multiplatform.

      As a CMS, yeah, it's not very widely used anymore; why would someone use it, with so many CMS options available? A web based system is much, much more efficient, especially regarding cost. Anything that requires a software client, especially anything which requires paid licenses, is just asinine, in my professional opinion.

  • by Hottie Parms ( 1364385 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:27PM (#27099627)
    Drupal et al make life a whole lot easier when it comes to updating a website and adding content. But what about the design?

    Unless you want to stick to the default Drupal (or insert CMS here) themes, you'll probably want to design your own CMS template so people get a unique feel for your website. You'll still need to fall back on your classic static web-design skills using programs like Dreamweaver (or notepad).

    Dreamweaver isn't dying, it's just falling into a more specialized category now. If you just used Dreamweaver as a way to update content, then you were really failing to use the program to it's full potential.
    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by greengreed ( 1330517 )
      Don't forget Drupal modules. Themes and modules don't magically appear from the void, somebody writes them, and this requires an editor.
    • by f1vlad ( 1253784 ) Works for Slashdot on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:42PM (#27099807) Homepage Journal

      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:

      • http://www.warnerbrosrecords.com/
      • http://change.gov/
      • http://community.michaeljackson.com/
      • http://ketnet.be/
      • http://ngycp.org

      more here [buytaert.net] and here [drupal.org].

      I completely agree however, drupal != dreamweaver.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      by AvitarX ( 172628 )

      It's true, and Dreamweaver's autocomplete is fantastic.

      I don't think there is much place for the GUI in template design, but the text editor in Dreamweaver is worth the money if you are a designer at a lower skill level.

      Considering one would need the other apps in the suite, keeping Dreamweaver will be a perk.

      Adobe should focus on making it a full fledged AMP (and others really) testing environment and it would be potent.

      Easy local testing, their sitemanager to sync with remote, fantastic text editor, and m

      • It's true, and Dreamweaver's autocomplete is fantastic.

        Serious question - what is autocomplete actually *for*? I've used a few editors with code-completion features, and I've never really seen the point. All it seems to do is make the computer chug and whirr while it tries to guess what I'm typing, and fails, until eventually it gives up and lets me move onto the next command.

        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by AvitarX ( 172628 )

          As alluded to in my post, it allows me to see a list of CSS properties (in a drop down that can easily be ignored), and then once I typed in the property, it gives a list of appropriate values.

          It does not make things quicker, it helps me keep track of the correct properties and values, since I don't do it enough to it all perfect, and it is quicker than browsing a reference site to see, "what type of border styles are there?"

          It does not interfere with the performance at all for me, and it does not obscure t

    • by JCSoRocks ( 1142053 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:57PM (#27100007)
      Yeah, this entire thing just sounds like FUD. Granted CMS's are the way to go for content updates but but unless you're a mom and pop shop you don't want to stick with a template... and that means hiring a designer... and that means using design tools.

      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 was never a good *design* tool, and I don't know how it ever got sold as one -- maybe the same way we got that horrible name "web designer" for client-side HTML coders.

      It's potentially legitimate to call it a WYSIWYG page layout tool for HTML, but that's about the limit. You can't create arbitrary visual compositions with it, you're stuck with whatever metaphors Macrodobe lays on top of the limited tools HTML/CSS have to offer. You certainly can't create drawings of any kind.

      If you want to do ac

  • by MrEricSir ( 398214 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:29PM (#27099647) Homepage

    It's true, most people who make sites in Drupal, Wordpress, etc. clearly didn't spend more than 10 minutes on the design.

  • by Shados ( 741919 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:34PM (#27099705)

    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.

    • by risk one ( 1013529 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @07:33PM (#27100409)

      Point Sharepoint Designer to a Sharepoint site where you have required permissions, and have fun.

      Fun? You must be joking. I've worked a lot with Sharepoint Designer and it's the most ungodly abomination of a software package I've ever had to touch. It makes the rest of Microsoft's applications look like they were made by NASA.

      The whole of Sharepoint is gargantuan mess, from the half implemented API to the ridiculous, overcomplicated, undocumented deployment procedures (restarting the webserver every time you change code, really?), to the insane use of tables in the HTML (have a look at the html on an average system page, and see if your mind can deal with five or six tables wrapped around every single design element).

      Sharepoint Designer is where you can really see Sharepoint for what it is. It has all these features that sound very nice, until you try to save an .aspx page and it replicates your previous change somewhere rather than the one you were currently checking in. You think "huh that's weird", delete, the extra code, rewrite the code you wanted to add, and check in again, and now the previous change appears three times. In the end the only solution is to delete the page and the associated content types from the site and create it again (and any pages that used it). That's the sort of wonderful behavior you can expect from Sharepoint Designer.

      I've never used the WYSIWYG editor because, frankly, I'm scared.

    • 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.

      There are only two problems with that. One is that SP Designer is slow, buggy, and encourages nasty practices (such as writing inline ASP.NET code - it allows that, but not the code-behind model). Another is that when you need SharePoint to do something that it doesn't do out of the box, you have to deal with its extensibility mechanisms - and at that point you suddenly discover how crappy they actually are, and how scarce documentation is (half the articles for SP classes on MSDN don't even have method des

    • by Bazouel ( 105242 )

      People designing sites in SharePoint use the Visual Studio extensions, not SP Designer!

      SharePoint Designer is based on FrontPage, *not* Expression Web. As such, it is one of the most obtrusive obnoxious web site designer. It will happily reformat your html, css and what not, even making it not work while doing so.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:38PM (#27099753)

    Am I doing this right? The whole comparing 2 different things?

    • by uniquename72 ( 1169497 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:52PM (#27099951)
      Yes, the reasons for using each are very different. If your site is dynamic, Drupal is great. If your site is static, Dreamweaver is a really good tool. While it may seem that more and more sites are becoming dynamic, I'd argue that there are still -- and will always remain -- a very large number of static sites cared for by single developers that have no need of a CMS.

      I know it's popular here to bash wysiwig editors (just write the code, dammit!), but Dreamweaver has gotten MUCH better since version 4.

      It's code is good, it works well with Flash, CSS and JavaScript. And if you're a designer, the Photoshop integration is pretty fantastic. Personally, I use Dreamweaver primarily for the site management tools, which are also very good.

      If you haven't used DW in the past 4 years, then you haven't used DW.
  • by icepick72 ( 834363 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:39PM (#27099771)
    Veryu misleading title. The story isn't about Dreamweaver but the dying of static HTML editing tools of any kind, contrasting them to the changing web. The web is becoming more dynamic. Some HTML editing tools are very static. Therein lies the problem for the old tools.
    • 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.

    • Re: (Score:2, Interesting)

      Agreed.

      The great majority of what I do are PHP based homegrown CMS type sites. I use Dreamweaver to manage the code, I use Photoshop and Illustrator for the graphics, and I use Firebug to figure out the CSS.

      I don't use Dreamweaver to it's fullest potential because I no longer do a lot of static HTML stuff, but I still find Dreamweaver useful for PHP, JavaScript and CSS coding, probably because I've been using it for 6 years.

    • And to think, if only he'd written this article ten years ago, he would have actually made a fairly obvious, marginally relevant point. It's just unfair is what it is.

  • by commodoresloat ( 172735 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:40PM (#27099781)

    That's the drag queen singer/performance artist who's working on a reality show, right?

    • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

      by dangitman ( 862676 )
      Yes, but it's coded in PHP. Witness the drama as straight tables go head-to-head with the polyamorous CSS shapeshifters, and a love-triangle forms when sexy interloper Ajax is suddenly introduced to the show.
  • by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:47PM (#27099859)

    Dreamweaver will always have a place next to microsoft word for helping moms everywhere create hideous, 1990's-era web pages.

    Posted anonymously because I have one of those moms, and I'd hate to break her heart. She things her pages are awesome.

  • Good riddance. (Score:5, Informative)

    by jonadab ( 583620 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:48PM (#27099881) Homepage Journal
    I've seen some of the HTML these tools (Frontweaver, Dreampage, HotMetal, etc) produce, and I Do Not Want It.

    I use Emacs and w3schools, and my HTML is clean, scalable, efficient, reasonably accessible, and very maintainable, and honestly I don't spend that much time on it. HTML is, fundamentally, very easy, once you know what you're doing.

    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.

    As far as Drupal, though, I thought that was a CMS. Do people really try to use it as an HTML editor? Ugh.
    • Re:Good riddance. (Score:4, Informative)

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday March 06, 2009 @07:00PM (#27100053)

      Do people really try to use it as an HTML editor?

      The point is that once you've got the template set up (or downloaded a theme or whatever), you DON'T use an html editor anymore. You type your content into your little box and hit the save button.

      Or did you use Dreamweaver to write your comment here?

    • Didn't these programs used to produce Spaghetti with &nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp&nbsp?

      I'm on the next tree over from you, except I'm going even more basic with notepad, because I never got around to looking at emacs etc.

      What is this "dynamic content" anyway? Some page with 7 comments of "nice page lulz"? Skip that, it offends my sense of style.

      I'm not sure I get this whole "CMS" thing, since I have an 80-page design template. I only have abo

  • by 93 Escort Wagon ( 326346 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @06:56PM (#27099997)

    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.

  • The real problem is dreamweaver code sucks compared to anything a decent programmer can just type out in notepad. The question becomes, would you rather use an open source CMS, code your own theme and get good code. Or would rather blow $400 on a piece of software that's going to spew out something totally unusable. Investing a little bit of time learning how to do css goes a long way.
  • by jperl ( 1453911 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @07:00PM (#27100047)
    the best html/css editor is any editor with syntax highlighting used in combination with brain.
    • by Shados ( 741919 )

      Of course, wysiwyg is just one of Dreamweaver's features, and I dont think its the most used among professionals. I haven't used it in a long time, but back then we used it for workflow integration, script debugging, code analysis (like checking broken links and quickly testing for code correctness), template generations, plugins, etc.

      The wysiwyg was only used a "real time semi-preview", and it was okay-ish at that.

    • by shutdown -p now ( 807394 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @08:34PM (#27100965) Journal

      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.

  • 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

  • Code Editor (Score:2, Informative)

    by allscan ( 1030606 )
    Lets not forget that Dreamweaver does more than WYSIWYG sites, it has a pretty decent code editor in it with built in libraries for JS, .NET, ColdFusion, HTML, JSP, PHP, ActionScript, Java, and others. I've actually used it quite extensively for straight code as it does a decent job of highlighting tags and the project organization is pretty nice too.
  • Dreamweaver Is Dying

    As Richter said in Total Recall: "About damn time."

    • Dreamweaver Is Dying

      As Richter said in Total Recall: "About damn time."

      Andy Richter was in Total Recall?

      Man, I gotta watch that movie again...

      • Dreamweaver Is Dying

        As Richter said in Total Recall: "About damn time."

        Andy Richter was in Total Recall?

        Man, I gotta watch that movie again...

        Well, I've noticed that in a certain light from just the right angle, Michael Ironside is a dead ringer for Andy Richter.

  • I hand code (Score:3, Insightful)

    by MazzThePianoman ( 996530 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @07:15PM (#27100217) Homepage
    I have opened up Dreamweaver a few times but prefer doing things by hand in Notepad++. There are plenty of free and open bulletproof css templates for getting the basic layout of any site started and from there diving into your own code helps you better understand what you are doing. I am sure Dreamweaver has its own crowd but between a good CMS and hand coding I have never felt behind the curve.
  • Come on, Dreamweaver, you've never given up on anything in your life! There still may be some time... Everything's going to be OK. Say it with me: "I believe we can reach the morning light".

  • I use both of them, along with Photoshop to design some websites, you still have to get the templates set up if you want a unique style in Drupal...it's like saying that Wordpress is going to kill Dreamweaver. This web designer needs to be smacked.
  • This just in (Score:4, Insightful)

    Architects no longer needed due to rise in demand for modular homes.

    Ridiculous, right? My point exactly.

  • While a lot of personal sites clearly don't put any effort into design, professional sites do and you won't do that in Drupal.

    I've used DreamWaver from version 4 when they two versions up to CS3. Admittedly I've used each version less than the previous. I only used CS3 a few times because it's on my work PC. The biggest downside for me is that Dreamweaver doesn't run on Linux without using Wine and I rather not deal with DW under Wine. Plus DW does still feel a bit more designer oriented and I'm doing mo
    • mac users

      Not this one. I do use Dreamweaver on the Mac but it's a total pile of junk. It might have got better in recent versions (I'm still using the MX 2004 version), but it's so buggy and slow it's embarrassing. Real Mac web developers use Coda.
  • by Dracos ( 107777 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @08:35PM (#27100981)

    ... so I can neglect to send flowers.

    For too long, too many self-described "web designers" have relied on Dreamweaver and its ilk to do their jobs for them. These people are not "web designers", they are graphic designers who think web documents are a blank canvas to be painted on, such as when they open a new file in Photoshop or Illustrator. The web is not a 3-panel brochure.

    This delusion is fostered by their uninformed clients and bosses who only consider what looks good and how fast (cheap) it is produced. Little explicit attention is paid to usability, readability, or accessibility.

    Good riddance, I say. The day these monkeys no longer have a crutch can not come soon enough.

  • by deanston ( 1252868 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @08:54PM (#27101161)
    Dreamweaver was great if you want to code ColdFusion, Flash, and Flex. For a full IDE it beats Visual Studio in many features. Eclipse and other free "IDE" don't come close in terms of responsiveness and user friendliness. The problem is CF/Flex is a small percentage of the web compared to PHP, ASP.NET, Java, and a host of new platforms and frameworks (Django, ROR, etc.). Now with the advent of open source CMS and wiki systems, even for .NET, plus free plug-ins for Eclipse to code just about anything, along with shrinking IT budget, WHY would anyone pay the equivalent for full VS for it? The Server + IDE has been Adobe's bread and butter for years, that's why it's critical for Adobe to keep pushing for AIR/Flash. The only way to make DW popular again I can see is embrace open source languages and new frameworks, and lower the price.
  • by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Friday March 06, 2009 @09:39PM (#27101461)

    This is not news.
    Modern Web-CMSes and feasable CSS made DW design capabilities and it's offline templating system completely superflous somewhere back in 2002 or 2003. In fact, I posted very much the same analysis on this issue about 5 or 6 years ago here on slashdot. Whatever is left of DW is here to stay for those doing the actuall screen/HTML design. The rext of us uses CSS frameworks and foundation templates and simply replaces the GFX and/or the colorcodes. I haven't used DW longer than 5 minutes since back in 2001.

  • by wandazulu ( 265281 ) on Friday March 06, 2009 @09:41PM (#27101477)

    I switched from doing everything in vi *to* Dreamweaver. I like having function lookup, automatic upload capability to the remote site, built in O'Reilly docs, etc.

    That said, I'm working with Dreamweaver the same way I did with vi, all typing, no layout. In addition, as I do some ColdFusion work, having that grammar built in too helps a lot.

  • Wait a second. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by /dev/trash ( 182850 ) on Saturday March 07, 2009 @02:43PM (#27106443) Homepage Journal

    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.

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