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."
Death... in MY Dreamweaver? (Score:5, Funny)
Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:5, Interesting)
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?
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 ;-))
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:5, Funny)
I use Notepad, MS Paint, and my browser to do my web design.
Now get off my lawn you hooligans!
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I use teco and mosaic.
And stop playing that damn music so loud!
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I use Notepad, MS Paint, and my browser to do my web design.
Now get off my lawn you hooligans!
What are you doing using a GUI? That just slows things down! I use nano to create my Gopher pages, and that's the way I likes it!
Think I'm joking? Check out my Slashdot user number...
Okay, I'm joking. :)
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:5, Funny)
I use a large stick to do my web design. How? Well, I go down to my basement and hit the Chinese illegal immigrant I have chained to my PC until he makes the page I want.
Funny, I do the same to the now unemployed american citizen who can't get well-fare thanks to his country's bankruptcy.
/ The future chinese dude.
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I write in plain text, wrapped at 50 chars per line, and make my viewers telnet to port 80 and manually GET the pages you insensitive clod!
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I write in plain text, wrapped at 50 chars per line, and make my viewers telnet to port 80 and manually GET the pages you insensitive clod!
50 chars? That's absurd! Go for the standard 80 chars.
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:5, Funny)
80 characters should be enough for anyone.
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I draw my design with ink on the IBM punchcard which I when mail to everyone who wants them.
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Have you tried the web developer extension for firefox? It lets you modify the stylesheets on the fly at least, not sure about html source.
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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.)
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Use Krita. It has the features Gimp lacks (like the CMYK colorspace IIRC).
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't see why you'd need CMYK for the web...
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:4, Funny)
I can't see why you'd need CMYK for the web...
Because some people print their webpages, duh.
You're obviously not an elite webdesigner.
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How can you admit productivity gains from Firebug, yet ignore productivity gains given by integrated development environments?
Dreamweaver's more for coders than designers (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Dreamweaver's more for coders than designers (Score:4, Informative)
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.).)?
Dreamweaver & Standards Compliance (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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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.
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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: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:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:5, Interesting)
There's gobs more but those are the first things that come to mind.
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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
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Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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#shutTheFuckUp{ /*put your style rules here*/
}
Shut the fuck up
There ya go.
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:5, Funny)
Surely you would want to use this more than once per page...
I would suggest something like:
text-decoration: blink;
}
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Basically, if you don't know at least CSS and HTML (preferably object oriented programming, MVC, database, design patterns, accessibility etc. too) then you've no place messing with web design, except for doing mockups in an art package.
There are a zillion "brochure" web sites out there, and not one of those web sites requires knowledge of CSS/HTML, OOP, MVC, DB, or design patterns.
No business messing with the web? Bite Me (Score:5, Insightful)
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:5, Funny)
Of course by then, I was so far in front of them, that it again was black magic to them
According to Clarke's Third Law, that means your web development skills are sufficiently advanced. Kudos!
Re:Is Dreamweaver good? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Next time anyone gets fired from a job due to their boss's incompetence, please tell a tabloid about how much money you could save them. And back it up with a slashdot/dailywtf story so the technocracy (i.e. the slashdot etc. community) will know that the (un)published story is in fact grounded in fact, or at least is valid [wikipedia.org] and/or sound [wikipedia.org].
Please do this, so that we can all have something funny to read, and so that the client has some clue that he's being ripped off by a salesman who is too stupid to even take advantage of the high price.
To mods:No, this is not, in fact, sarcastic.
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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".
I know this isn't the point of your post, but I'd like to quibble with this statement. Trying to make a distinction between "amateurs" and "developers" is all well and good, but where do you draw the line?
We already have people trying to control how we can develop things by splitting the camp between "hobbyists" and "professionals" (aka Microsoft). Their intent is to imply that if you aren't paid by a big corporation (like Microsoft) that your application is obviously shit.
We also have people trying to p
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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,
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People used tables because that's all that was there. There were no DIV or SPAN tags, and CSS was still a pipe dream in somebody's bong. It's hard to make the claim that something was wrong from the beginning when what was right didn't exist, but I
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Try using Django. kthxbai
To be fair, that's more MTV [djangoproject.com]. It still rocks, though.
I want my, I want my, I want my MTV (Score:3, Funny)
Try using Django. kthxbai
To be fair, that's more MTV [djangoproject.com].
Does that mean web developers who use Django get their money for nothing and their chicks for free?
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Speaking as someone who's got some schooling and background in graphical design: No, I wouldn't hire that designer. Photoshop is just that much more useful. Odds are the "designer" working with gimp will be spending so much time coding that he won't be doing much real work. Even with the film gimp modifications etc, it can't compete with Photoshop, really. And that's feature wise.
When it comes to workflow/UI, it's even worse. GIMP is designed by a programmer for another programmer, thinking that it works we
Content Management System is not a design program (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Dreamweaver attempts to do the WYSIWYG which is geared towards those people who don't really know how to code.
DW has its place due to site management and debugging tools, and it doesn't force the wysiwyg. When I use it, it's usually with the mixed text/graphical view, because it is faster to zero in on certain parts of the code graphically by clicking there, then switching to the code pane.
Essentially, it's much faster to scan a picture than text, even if your markup is tidy, and it is nice to see the less-frequent available parameters for CSS in a pane rather than pull all of them from memory. DW's code has improv
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.
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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
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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.
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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
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's a terrible design program too. (Score:2)
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
While we're on the topic... why Photoshop? (Score:4, Informative)
1. Designer - Design tools such as Photoshop, illustrator etc (not my role!)
2. Front end developer - Photoshop (for slicing and dicing PSDs supplied by the designer), text editor (I'm using Geany at present) and lots of browsers.
This is pretty much the process I've used when I've been involved on the client side, and while it can have its problems (many designers who've never actually had to code a site have trouble groking liquid layouts and other web-centric design issues), it seems to be the best setup. People who are good coders and talented in both art and visual communications are rare, so it makes sense to divide the labor.
The one thing that surprises me about this process, though, is that almost everyone uses Photoshop to do the artwork. This seemed like a basic fact of life to me, until I ended up working at a shop that did everything in Illustrator, and I was surprised to find out how much better this setup was -- not only did the artists seem to be more productive, the vector artwork seemd a lot easier to take apart however I saw fit as a coder. After working there for three years, it's been kindof painful going back to working with PSDs, and I wonder how much of the industry has every tried both given the apparent advantage of Illustrator...
(And this is to say nothing of Fireworks. I mentioned it in the parent and don't want to sound like a broken record, but if Illustrator is better than Photoshop for this stuff, Fireworks is another 10 times better -- it's all the good stuff about both integrated into a program expressly designed for making websites, and it's so good at its job that I don't understand why its product cousin Dreamweaver gets all the fame.)
No design needed (Score:5, Funny)
It's true, most people who make sites in Drupal, Wordpress, etc. clearly didn't spend more than 10 minutes on the design.
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:Adapt, don't die...and even MS has the solution (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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Err, no, you don't.
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Re:Adapt, don't die...and even MS has the solution (Score:4, Informative)
It doesn't matter. The most you'll ever need to do is recycle the application pool, and users won't even notice when you do aside for a slight lag if you don't have a load balancer.
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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
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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.
Microsoft is dying, long live McDonalds! (Score:5, Insightful)
Am I doing this right? The whole comparing 2 different things?
Re:Microsoft is dying, long live McDonalds! (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
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.
The concept is more generic (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
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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.
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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.
Long Live DruPaul? (Score:3, Funny)
That's the drag queen singer/performance artist who's working on a reality show, right?
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still relevant to moms everywhere (Score:3, Funny)
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)
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)
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?
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Didn't these programs used to produce Spaghetti with            ?
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
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Content with a lot of needless markup ;)
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.
Dreamweaver code sucks (Score:2, Insightful)
wysiwyg was always destined to die (Score:4, Insightful)
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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.
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.
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
Code Editor (Score:2, Informative)
Good. (Score:2)
Dreamweaver Is Dying
As Richter said in Total Recall: "About damn time."
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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...
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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)
Hang in there, Dreamweaver (Score:2)
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".
Weaving Drupal (Score:2)
This just in (Score:4, Insightful)
Architects no longer needed due to rise in demand for modular homes.
Ridiculous, right? My point exactly.
His argument is flawed (Score:2)
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
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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.
Let me know when the funeral is (Score:3, Interesting)
... 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.
Right tool for the right job (Score:3, Informative)
Captain Obvious strikes again! (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
What's with the Dreamweaver hate? (Score:3, Informative)
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)
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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