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Open Source Alternatives to Dreamweaver Templating
comforteagle writes "One of the greatest hurdles for people wishing to 'switch' to FOSS and Linux is finding a good replacement tool for what they are accustomed to using. In Open Source Alternatives to Dreamweaver Templating Mark Stosberg investigates what open source solutions are available to replace Dreamweaver's powerful templating capabilities." Update: 01/09 by J : Hey, just for the record, Template Toolkit, which provides the solution Mr. Stosberg settles on, also powers much of Slashdot.
If you want a constant layout for a page, why not just use php -- require("top.php") page contents, then require("bottom.php") -- or even a !--#include virtual in html? I can't stand using most webdev tools, why not just use a simple, free text editor?
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Dreamweaver is built out of javascript and java with quite mnimal os dependancy, iam suprised WINE wont run it, shame its not FOSS but that hasnt stopped people hacking software before
I find it pretty amazing that dreamweaver templates are still being used. My school started with templates and found them too buggy and complicated so we switched to contribute. Now we're in the process of going to a CMS, because the non technical people who need to change the site are still having too many problems editing. The tech department was forced to hire a consultant just to teach everyone first how to use dreamweaver, and then contribute.
vi
... like the body or the subject!)
HTH
HAND
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment
I've given more than one open source content management solution a spin and IMHO, LogiCreate does a better job than most at form-content separation. I think their business model is to give away most parts but then charge for the web-store component, but go check it our for yourself: www.logicreate.com
http://tinyurl.com/4ny52
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"shirinking-gap"?
vicious, untreated political sewage...niche entertainment for the spiritually unattractive...worshipless pap
Dreamweaver templates are a bad idea, from the dark ages of the web. If you are still generating sites by hand, you can do something fairly simple with PHP and CSS or one of the Apache modules/filters.
A better solution is to use a content management system (CMS).
They got a little thing called server behaviours. Dreamweaver is great for php/asp scripting using these. Not all the behaviours generate worthy code, but you can write your own and have full access to control them through javascript. You quickly can build a library and generate new pages quite quickly. And if your customers have a copy they can modify those pages with little code knowledge.
People using Dreamweaver aren't going to switch over to ANYTHING remotely resembling "ttree" and use Perl to pre-process their HTML... OMFG, I'M ROTFLM - phew, that was a lot of acronyms.
However, IMNSHO, there is nothing that comes close to Dreamweaver (and it's templating) in the FOSS world that I've found. NVU, which is an excellent tool is about as close as I've seen.
As much of a raging POS as dreamweaver is, it still remains popular for that reason.
For anything beyond a few pages, I'm finding PHP and CSS to be the way to go, but then again, I code by hand with a text editor.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
When I was starting out I used Dreamweaver all the time. It was fine for small sites that didn't need too many updates. It also taught me the basics of html once I learned to press the view source button a few times.
The templates came in very handy when I moved onto doing larger static sites. They made keeping a consistent look and feel easy, especially when combined with CSS. As they do not need any server side technology they can be very useful.
But nothing will compete in the long run with server side technologies. It doesn't matter which one as they all do essentially the same job. But there is a huge learning curve that many people do not want to try to overcome. (I can remeber telling my PHB that he could use Dreamweaver like Word, I spent a lot of time cleaning up after him though)
Dreamwever and even Front Page and the like have been invaulable in getting large numbers of people creating their own web based material and probably have a far higher impact in this area than they are given credit for by some professional developers. An alternative that is open source and *good* would be a killer app for linux. Its all very well saying "learn to do it properly and use vi to write your code" for the average user the experience of seeing a web page being generated is something akin to magical and they would run a mile from a text editor.
another Roadkill on the Information Superhighway
Once again someone misses the point. The "Killer Feature" isn't the templates. The killer feature is templates coupled with the editor & kitchen-sink that is Dreamweaver. By themselves they're nothing special.
Who was this written for? People that need something incredibly easy are not going to use anything remotely like what he is suggesting. People that need actual power are going to use PHP, ASP.NET, etc.
This article was written for who again? No one uses DW templating as a serious tool.
And there really is nothing that is OSS that can compete against it right now. Nvu is slowly becoming usable, but last I checked even version 0.70 won't let you start by default using XHTML 1.1 rather than HTML 4.0. Tools like WYSIWYG web pager designer tools are going to be important to making OSS viable with many businesses and home users.
Click here or a puppy gets stomped!
XSLT is the most obvious and powerful way to make templating for webpages.
perception is reality
Write the software yourself, if you can't then shut up and stick with Dreamweaver. IF you can't afford it, then just don't get the software then. No one is obligated to write software for anyone and software is not essential to live.
I faced the same problem with friends and professional clients - a mixture of common problems left them mith a real mess, and wary of consultants and designers.
I ended up writing my own Content Management System, and am now trying to slow things down...
I haven't even finished writing it and the company I work for (a systems integrator) want to license it for commercial use for several big projects. I have agreed with them to let me keep it open source and free for non commercial use - so you can find out about it on the PluggedOut webspace where I give all kinds of code away.
Actually - the CMS project has been a real eye opener to the problems of getting corporates to understand open source... another story for another time :)
This was my option, some years ago - I made my own templating script in Perl. It does everything I need it to, and I've used it to create several sites and to manage my own few little pages. It can parse a rudimentary config file, modify links in include files, and so on. My motivation was that there was no Dreamweaver for Debian - and that I didn't want anything of Dreamweaver except for a decent templating system.
Of course, I came in having learned HTML before I touched Dreamweaver, and then having learned Perl/PHP after. So it wasn't out of the question for me to use my own templating system.
This gadget was also the very first thing I made in Perl after reading the Llama book. It reads like a bit of a joke, but it's still useful and I use it.
Dreamweaver has developed into a superb web design/development tool and there is nothing even remotely close to it in FOSS. Its one of those invaluable tools that ensure so many of us keep a Win2000/XP copy. And please dont say it runs under wine. Tried it, and found wine to be a slow ass unstable partially function piece of garbage.
Do not try to read the dupe, thats impossible. Instead, only try to realize the truth
What truth?
There is no dupe
It took little more effort than to run through a simple "how to set-up PHP with Apache" guide. For windows, see: www.thesitewizard.com/archive/php4install.shtml
Doing a file include is extremely easy to start with. And from there, you can make your web page smarter by, for example, disabling (index) links that go to the page itself, generating TOCs from a single description, etc.
I found that Running Apache+PHP locally was totally non-intrusive. I just use http://localhost/... for previewing.
When my hosting service did not support PHP, I used 'wget' to get a pure HTML version of my web page.
I casually maintain a personal and a company website (ivan.vecerina.com and www.xitact.com). I find this basic PHP solution to be easily maintainable.
I've moved most of our site over to a database backend with users able to edit the page from within IE using the SPAW web editor from Solmetra. http://www.solmetra.com/en/disp.php/en_products/en _spaw/en_spaw_about.
Yes, I know, IE, but remember that's what most people use. They're working on a gecko version currently, but it's still in beta. The current version works fine in firefox now except that you don't get wysiwyg editing, just html.
The way it works is this:
We have a web page layout designed by a graphic artist. The content part of the page is stored in a database. The user logs into to the system and as the user surfs the site, any web page that the user can edit has a button at the bottom saying "edit this page". Permissions are done through a mysql database. Spaw doesn't care how you do security, they just provide the editor. When the user presses edit, the page is reloaded, but this time the content is loaded in the spaw editor embedded in the browser. User edits page, presses button to publish and the data is pumped back into the database and published instantly.
I *really* like this system. I can customize the menus and create my own styles for the style menu. I put the official company colors as a style on an external style sheet and then add it to the menu. People that want to hightlight text can then use the official company colors. If the colors change, I just edit one style sheet.
It really has worked well for us. No more licensing or software install hassles. Need to work from home? If you've got IE 5.5 or higher, and soon the gecko engine, you're set.
While it isn't quite the same as Dreamweaver templates, the result is similar. Users can only edit the parts of the page that we give them permission to edit. We don't have to worry about a user deciding not to go with the approved layout and template.
I really can't say enough good things about the SPAW product.
Or the LAML approach?
I hate it when people just say "<insert technology here> is a bad idea" and throw around "It needs a content manangement system!!!!" as the best solution.
Getting new clients who have been exposed to this mentality by a previous company or individual ALWAYS sucks.
I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Smarty. It seems to be gaining popularity as a useful system for separating content from presentation. http://smarty.php.net/
Final Table Team - Poker Disc
Most people developing in PHP or ASP are using a server, and usually developing for multiple browsers (something that DW still hasn't gotten right)
I used to use DW then moved on to homesite because I got sick of cleaning up code or rewriting the javascript code to work in both IE, Netscape, and Moziila that DW created.
Now I use Apache, developing with Kdewebdev w/CSS (Quanta) and mutiple browsers and get the pages to look correct the first time all the time, regardless of what browser is ised, for the WYSIWYG portion of it. Include files are not inferior if you are viewing the pages in real browsers. Difference is, you see your changes as they happen as opposed to having to go back and tweak them per browser as I always had to with DW.
I used DW up to even the MX version... and it still had all the same problems it did with formatting and javascript from previous versions.
I've done a few projects using Smarty. It's pretty nifty, keeps all your markup separate from your code... It has some simple flow control stuff in it that makes the code nice and clean too.
Recently, I've been using this to serve up XUL and it works remarkably well.
Subject says it all.
ViM RockS!! or any old plain text editor.
that's probably a good thing - unless it would also throw in content negotiation and adjust your page headers to be 'application/xhtml+xml' mime type instead of 'text/html'.
without that, internet explorer will choke on your pages that are sent with the correct mime type, and if you don't send your pages as 'application/xhtml+xml' then you are using XHTML improperly anyway and lose many of the main benifits of using it in the first place.
I do - and for what I believe are good reasons.
Dreamweaver templating is not the end-all, be-all of web design, but it is a very good solution to the problems of wedding design and relatively static content. Needs vary by project, but usually, I am required to focus on the look of the material (demands of the job) as opposed to the actual content.
The templating system helps in that it is convenient and it is done on my workstation, where I have the maximum of control, vs. on the server, which is someone else's domain. By preprocessing, I narrow down the potential issues that can arise.
Futhermore, the Dreamweaver system, while not perfect, is easy to use because it is wrapped up in Dreamweaver itself. Dreamweaver handles some of the messy details that I really don't care to think about anymore. Those details are problems that have been solved already in a less-than-perfect manner, but solved nonetheless.
Like I said, my concern is look - not the information itself. The DW templating system is a pragmatic approach to web design.
To celebrate the occasion of my 1000th post, I will post no more forever on Slashdot. Goodbye.
The high price is only for the current version of Dreamweaver. If you go to PriceWatch or PriceGrabber you can find older versions (I bought version 3.0 for around $60.00) for far less than the $400.00 price quoted in the article.
Someone put a black hole in my pocket and now I'm broke.
Isn't the lack of any particular program, its a lack of innovation and an inability to think outside of the box and produce new ideas for applications that provide a true advantage. I mean, 15 years ago probably if people were trying to get some hypothetical open source Unix system onto business desktop systems, probably everybody would have assumed that a big drawback was the lack of a top-rate text-based spreadsheet to compete with Lotus 1-2-3. And a bunch of competing projects would start up, and maybe a few years down the road you would have two or three almost-complete 1-2-3 alternatives for our OS. But would that make businesses switch? No, because in the mean time the commercial software industry would have moved on to the more advanced graphical paradigm as exemplified by Excel, and we'd still be behind. If all you do is copy existing commercial software, you'll ALWAYS be behind.
<?php include('common/header.php'); ?> :) ?>
...
<?php include('common/footer.php');
/* This is free software, available under
the terms of the GNU GPL.
Signature.
I maintain a fairly large PHP / CSS-based site. I use Dreamweaver MX 2004, and it's always get the code tab open -- except when I'm dealing with tables. Yeah, of course I know how to hand-code tables, but man, to be able to graphically split and combine cells, and completely reformat tables -- where by hand I'd have to edit each cell / row manually -- is a huge timesaver.
I also like PHP's Site Maintenance features and have found it to be flexible enough to handle a variety of different testing environments (local over the network, FTP, etc.). And finally, its site-wide search and replace capabilities are excellent.
Could I get away with a freeware editor and some sort or grep-type functionality? Sure . . . but in general Dreamweaver is a really solid tool specifically geared towards web development, and like someone already mentioned, nothing else comes close. The only problems are its steep price tag and mediocre CSS capabilities.
I was prepared to say you didn't RTFA, when i finally understood your second idea: you can easily generate a pure html site using php on a local webserver and then wget to make it a pure html site !
Thanks, really.
The majority of development has moved over to a subproject on the logicampus project on sourceforge. sf.net/projects/logicampus . Feel free to post any questions over there - the main .com site is not being updated much, although that may change in the next few months.
/. here. :)
What are some of the pros/cons you saw in LC compared to other projects? Mostly curious here, but it's nice to get that kind of unsolicited plug on
creation science book
I use Dreamweaver. Extensively. Over 70 different sites are stored within Dreamweaver.
I also use PHP Includes. Extensively. Over half of my sites are PHP Include -based as far as templates are concerned.
One of the things that Dreamweaver MX 2004 blows everything else out of the water is the ability to *internally* understand PHP Includes, and render the contents in the edit window.
The only time things get dicy is when I need to edit any of the "common/layout-*.inc" files since they're partial HTML so Dreamweaver *does* have a little hard time dealing with those, but most of those edits are maintained in the Code view window anyway so it's not a big deal.
For any serious web developer, Dreamweaver is so much more than its templates, and is almost a must to have in one's toolkit.
From TFA:
"comforteagle (http://steve.osdir.com/) writes..."
Is it so hard for OSS coders to just duplicate the feature in things like Bluefish and other web editors?
I love open source as much as anyone else, but Dreamweaver really is the best-of-breed for web designers and developers who want to build good, standards-based sites. Its templating sustem is a boatload easier to use than ttree and Perl. I don't want to have to code, just so I can get coding!
And you know what? If Macromedia came out with Dreamweaver for Linux, I'd buy and use it...at least until the OSS folks duplicated that awesome templating system.
I know they'd never release anything open source, but just having a package like Dreamweaver available on Linux would be great for giving the platform credibility, and at the same time prove there was a market for Linux software.
It would make a lot of sense too: Linux is predominantly used to *serve* pages, why not have it *create* them too.
I thought Macromedia were considering the idea of porting a few of their products to Linux. Or at the very least, getting them working happily with WINE.
What happened, or is it still happening?
Dreamweaver is a tool. vi is a tool.
I use both of them and they rock.
If you don't like Dreamweaver, get over it. Or learn to use it. It writes nice clean code and the WYSIWYG factor is invaluable, even if you know how to code by hand.
I know if I tried laying out some of the stuff I've done from scratch with a text editor, I'd be wasting a whole lot of time counting tags, setting colours, adjusting column widths, etc.
DW used to be a bit awkward and buggy but it's definitely grown into an extremely useful tool, whether you're laying up a simple page or doing something more complex.
My point is - you should find, learn and use the tools that maximise your productivity. Too many people slag off particular methods they don't find personally useful, but it doesn't mean the program is crap.
chown -R us yourbase
Well if the major browsers are starting to implement CSS Positioning (CSS-P) the need for bulky templates should be removed. When I used to use the templates it was just so that the pages could have the same layout, but this was done by using tables extensively, making the HTML messy. As CSS P gets implemented the problem of tables being used to format pages rather than for displaying data should disappear. Then the bits that you want to stay the same on all pages can be contained in their own CSS sections which can just appear at the top of the pages, and the whole thing becomes easier to maintain. I use Maxs Beauty HTML as my WYSIWIG editor over others, mainly because of its multiple file find/replace tool being one thats nice to use.
The problem, as ever, is IE - it doesn't support it properly. Firefox and Opera of course, do.
Professor Karmadillo Songs of Science
Well, maybe I don't understand what it is that is so special about Dream Weaver's templating engine, but it sure doesn't sound like anything too special. It would be fairly easy to do the same thing with WebMacro (site down at the moment), or it's spinoff Velocity. Although both are intended as "Templating Engines" that run on the server, it's easy enough to set them up to generate static content the way that the article describes. Similarly, more extensive content management systems like Apache Forrest, which is based on Cocoon are available. I don't see what the big deal is.
Signatures are a waste of bandwi (buffering...)
...in the hands of a competent web designer, who knows how to use Dreamweaver and how to produce maintainable html/css/whatever without it, Dreamweaver can save a fair bit of time on the visual bits of layout etc. while still spitting out clean and compliant code.
:)
I worked on a 3000+ page static site, and without DW & Templates, that summer would have been hell on earth. At the end though, we finished early and had a site that's still in use today for a large UK university both internally and externally. Result!
Game dev and music blog
(it's just a silly hack) - use realtime HTML, CSS and Javascript preview :)
So what's new. Dreamweaver runs dog-slow on every OS I've used it with. Once I learned Perl Template Toolkit I no longer had any reason to stick with it.
Yet again /. published what is a plug for one product disguised an an "independent" survey of the available products ... The selection of "his" product as the best before commencing on the "survey" should be a clue; likewise choosing one aspect of Dreamweaver that "his" product could be claimed to match and then claiming that as Dreamweaver's most valuable feature is anothe clue.
... but this isn't that comparison.
If Microsoft were to submit such a sparse "comparison" that stated their product to be the best and then rubbished the rest in a few lines each, would Slashdot be so eager to publish it on the site ??
An in-depth comparison of open source alternatives to Dreamweaver would be very welcome
I am surprised how few people seem to use XSLT. For static pages, I use the ant style task to generate my web page via XSLT and XML. So no 'bringing down the server' at all.
Situation: You have a client who wants to update their own website but is a notorious cheapskate. They can't/won't pay up for a custom CMS and/or are too inept to handle that.
Answer: Macromedia Contribute. As a designer, you can create a non-client-destructible webpage that they can edit text on to their hearts content.
Necessary technology? Dreamweaver templates. And I have no complaints in using them... it's a thousand times better than getting fifty requests a week for changes to copy ("can we use more exclamation marks!!!!!!?!!!!" "I would like to use "as" instead of "like" throughout the site" etc) and then having said client try and dick me around on price.
Checkout Bluefish (http://bluefish.openoffice.nl/), its my Dreamweaver replacement on Linux and it takes care of all my needs.
Personally, I think most trolling is caused by the need for attention that many trolls are unable to find elsewhere. Also, on occation, people are just bored, but those trolls are kinda funny every now and then. But hey, that just my psychoanalysis.
Firstly Dreamweaver's templating can hardly be described as powerful, its a pretty obvious and standard tool, and any web design application that doesn't have something like this is useless in any real world application. Obviously css is the standard to use for most continuity and all you have left is things like copyright notices and menus. PHP can handle the job easily but if you're not up to that then I have no idea, Nvu doesnt seem to do it, what can I say, that sucks.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
Not to shit on your parade, but assembly programming is trivial unless you're some kind of lamebrain who thinks CPUs should run OO java bytecode.
Anyone who is switching to open source products should know better then the propigate the web with more shitty websites with the likes of dreamweaver.
Why spend $400, when you can get a perfectly good html editor for nothing with Mozilla? The editor has three or four tabs which display varying levels of code, from WYSIWYG to plain text, so you can use the GUI and see the tags even if you are stuck on Windoze.
Those looking to move up in the world can try out Bluefish and Quanta. Bluefish is an excellent html editor that does CSS, tables, frames and has excellent project management all in easy to use pulldown menus and tabbed button bars. Quanta has the same but like most KDE things, it follows Microsoft examples more closely and has autocomplete and document trees as well as file trees. I prefer bluefish, but that's only because I don't have much html to write.
The whole issue of templates looks overblown to me. As the author says:
Include files can also create more difficult maintenance. Say you have the common case of having header and footer include files. What happens when you want to add another standard piece of HTML in the middle of the page? You would have to visit each file that uses the include files and add a token for a third include file.
It's hard for me to imagine that common situation. Why can't you just modify the header or the footer to include the information? Can't you put dynamic information in the middle of both the header and the footer file by using a php script? If so, I don't understand why it's so hard to modify the "middle" of a document.
It's also hard for me to imagine what's hard about finding your pages if you have good project management like Bluefish has.
Its all very well saying "learn to do it properly and use vi to write your code" for the average user the experience of seeing a web page being generated is something akin to magical and they would run a mile from a text editor.
Yikes! You might want to use some valoline and at least recommend kate at that rate. Vi rocks for remote administration because it's always there, but a neophyte should at least have syntax highlighting to help them along. Well, I suppose there's nothing wrong with cutting and pasting between X or virtual terminals, but the tools above are much easier on the nooooobie.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
I guess you're the one who designed this site with your much better tools huh?
?
table> /td> /td> /table> /td> /table> /table> /table> /table> /table> /table> /table> /table>
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/softwareList
dlc=en&lc=en&product=62740&lang=en&cc=us&os=228
table>
table>
table>
table>
table>
table>
td>Content
table>
td> table> td>Here
Are we supposed to be impressed? Depends how small it is.
Open Office draw is a reasonable program to use for layout of fliers etc. It also works pretty good for creating mock-ups of what you want a website to look like. If there was a 'save as html' feature it would be the perfect html editing tool.
Need a website host? Try out http://WebQualityHost.net
He addresses includes in the article. In fact the article could be entitled "Macromedia inverts the traditional include processing". You obviously didn't read the article.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
I just use a 60 line homebrewed XML pipelining app for my web templates.
Photos.
I've seen what the tigris guy's are doing with scarab issue tracking system via velocity templates and I'm very impressed. The recursive development with velocity is much faster than JSP's and allows for very complete scripting.
I currently am maintaining and building onto a TCL based templating engine that is albeit limited in some ways but still rock solid and fully extensible.
If full JS support is available for your users, you could always dump the server side templating model and switch to a server dump to JS native data structures (arrays & json) and just do your templating in Java Script. I've got ton's of this code in production and it's way faster than doing server side templating and the deveopment cycle time is considerably less. But you really need to set your browser support to just Mozilla (1.3+), IE (5.5sp2+) and maybe Konquorer (safari) to do this kind of DHTML application programming well.
I've dumped JSP's about a year ago and now have a very simple servlet based template model.
JsD
Thank you for sharing this profound insight with us. I think I speak for the entire slashdot troll behavioral science community when i say that.
Check out:9 /article111.html
http://linuxfocus.open.ac.uk/English/September199
http://jones.tc/htm4l/htm4l/index.html
taltman@NOSHPAM.gmail.commerce
Since we are talking about a Linux box here, one can install PHP, Apache and MySQL (all FOSS) on their box, download a suitable CMS script like PHP Nuke, Post Nuke, Mambo (all FOSS), etc and maintain a whole website with unlimited number of pages with it. Besides as far as I understand, news and high volume sites don't really 'hand-code' their HTML (WYSIWYG or not), they use similar scripts. So its really an irrelevant article.
Dreamweaver is an impressive behemoth of a tool, no doubt whatsoever. Back in 1999/2000 it was the only possible way to edit and manage websites on a professional level. Dreamweavers wysiwyg power with the older browsers and it's HTML editing features are unmatched. The template engine completely abstracts changes to a website in your developement directory and automatically keeps track of anything you what across multiple documents. If DW doesn't crash and screw up your template dir that is - which does happen more often than you like. It's the best thing you can use ... ...if you don't have a CMS.
;-)
Which gets me right to the point:
Sorry, but it's like five years since the early dot-bomb days where dynamic server side stuff was considered exotic and people got payed for klicking static websites together. You may haven't noticed, but the world has moved on. There are something like fifteen bazillion open source content management systems out there. One better than the next.
Who the fuck needs DW nowadays? You don't want DW! DWs concepts are ancient by todays standards. The last time I used it was about 4 years ago in some project where the system team couldn't get their stuff together and set up a halfway decent JSP framework and we had to hack the webdocs by hand in record time. And my web productivity has tripled by now, since I exclusively use content management systems (as every body else does), and be it "only" to generate the html docs offline and publish the output to static webspace.
Honestly now: Ditch DW allready, it's nothing but a huge waste of time these days. Trust me, I make a living with this stuff. And take a look at one of the frameworks above. To save your time, I recommend checking out one of the following: Plone/Zope, Callisto CMS, Mambo, Typo3, Mason, Slashcode, or (forgot this one above) Xoops. Save yourself half to three quarters of webdev time in the long run.
Oh, and welcome to 2005.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
I couldn't disagree more. Every contemporary tool like that I've seen is a child's toy, no matter how pretty or expensive.
Over the Christmas break, I was helping my father with the web site for his new company. He's not an experienced web developer, so he went on a short introductory course about HTML and such, and bought a copy of Dreamweaver MX. He actually didn't do a bad job of designing the appearance of his site and knocking up the basic pages, and for that the software was fine. But he wanted to do a couple of pretty standard things -- different link colours for links on his menu bar, for example, and a two-column layout -- that he just couldn't figure out how to do in Dreamweaver without using awkward tables that were breaking horribly in various browsers/text sizes. Neither the on-line help nor the two books on the package he'd bought brought enlightenment.
I showed him the routine tricks in CSS to achieve these goals in about fifteen minutes, and his problems were solved, giving him the appearance he wanted all along. In fact, I didn't even use the funky CSS editing stuff built into Dreamweaver. It was so cumbersome that it was faster to just edit the raw CSS and let the funky stuff pick up the changes than it was to work out how to use the funky stuff from the on-line hindr^H^H^H^H^Hhelp.
By the way, I also designed and help maintain a somewhat large and popular hobbyist site (maybe 100 significant pages, 30 of them visited frequently, and taking 1,000+ hits on our busier days) with nothing but a text editor, some graphics packages and a couple of scripts. We write the main content in XML, generate and customise the standard boilerplate during XSLT conversion to (X)HMTL, and use CSS -- also hand-crafted -- for the visual appearance, tweaking for printing, etc. In the nature of our site, it gets a major update (dozens of pages changing fundamentally) about 4 times a year, and minor updates every couple of days, often by fairly non-technical users, and this system has served us very well.
To my knowledge, the entire site also works correctly on screen and when printed, in every major browser. I've never encountered a web design package that achieves anything close to 100% success when using more than trivial mark-up. For a large, frequently-maintained site like this, there is simply no substitute for an informed and careful team sorting out the HTML mark-up (or, in our case, XSLT) and CSS to be used up-front, testing on lots of different browsers and doing their homework about browser quirks, checking out the appearance at different resolutions and text sizes, checking for accessibility issues, etc. Using a package like Dreamweaver might make the initial HTML+CSS design work easier in this sort of context, but it stops adding value pretty early on when you get to the serious stuff.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Personally untill Linux can have simple installation of programs it'll be a while before the general web user will switch. For example I tried XandorOS and man I though wtf am I still doing with windows? This is a pretty nice looking distro and the install was beautifull. Well then I tried to instll Firefox (isnt installed by default) and man what a shitty deal for a Linux beginner it was. I went to the xandros forums and there was a write up on installing Firefox that for a first time user would scare them back to windows.
Also personally once Photoshop was to hit Linux Im pretty sure there would be a huge exedus from windows, plus imagine how big the photohop userbase penetration woudl be once pirated copies started to appear.
by TheSpoom (715771) Uncaring Linux user here. I have nothing to add to this but please continue. *munches popcorn*
DreamWeaver is a nice tool for many things, (such as rapid prototyping or completing web design) but using it for templating is a nightmare. Its also a stretch to get it to create Pure CSS designs. Biased ofcourse, as I helped create the project, but using SilverStripe alongside a WYSIWIG or raw-html editor is your best bet. It seperates the HTML, the "templating", CSS, and content, and among many other advantages, makes it easy to generate forms, and re-use ("repurpose") content. The content, and the ability to add pages, etc, is all handled by a content management system. This is how the process of building and maintaining websites is going to evolve --- no longer do we need to deal with spagetti messes of HTML, textual content, Javascript, CSS, and server side scripts such as PHP, ASP, or Perl all being tangled. Instead, they will each be neatly seperated with seperate access controls that suit business owners, designers and programmer/scripter's needs and skillsets. Check out silverstripe.com for details... (and yes, to please the slashdot massses, it is a server technology that runs on linux servers exclusively)
A lot of posts here is missing the point, which is that people who uses Dreamweaver wants WYSIWYG editing, not lots of textfields, possibly even with some kind of made up markup. If you have mainly unchanging static content, there isn't much reason to have dynamics on the serverside.
In fact, I would want to have WYSIWYG for dynamic content too, if possible. And it looks like it may be on its way, check out Mozile - preferably in a Gecko browser so you can try it out live. It looks a bit dead when you look at the page, but view the mailing list archives for very recent updates, including installable extensions.
For you who are too lazy to click, Mozile is a system for rich editing of HTML directly in pages, what is extra special is that you define what areas are editable, and then you can post back just that part or the whole page, via POST, WebDav or a few other methods. And it can be used just by including a few javascripts in your page, or it can be installed as an extension in Firefox/Mozilla. A perfect match for editing any online content with direct results, be it blogs, news or docs or whatever.
Check it out, this could well be the next great thing, and if you like the Gecko family, also a great way to promote your favourite. If you are so inclined, I'm sure the project also could use more people testing and developing.
I'm impressed, and I'm most likely gonna use this or parts of it myself. What would be really interesting would be to extend the WebDav functionality to talk to subversion, sadly that protocol is really complicated (even though built upon Dav) and not really well documented (as in easy to read, the facts are there). But it should be possible to pull off with ethereal, or if any of the developers would want to lend a helping hand towards such an effort.
Spine World
For what I do it would be insane to spend 400 bucks on a copy of Dreamweaver. You can manage a nice looking business site with Nvu, if you're working with largely static content. The style sheet editor could use some work, but give them time.
Linspire is backing Nvu development and they seem to be making excellent progress. But, you're right about it defaulting to HTML 4.0.
Still, it's wonderful to watch the pace of development.
That's our life, the big wheel of shit. - The Fat Man, Blue Tango Salvage
Thought it was going to be a reference to plone..
I've been playing around with plone today and
its amazing what you can do with little effort.. But I've got friends who are replacing Dreamweaver with plone..
Just say no to license servers!!
Nvu (http://www.nvu.com/) bills itself as "the complete web authoring system for linux". Not sure the status of it, or whether it offers templating, but it ought to if it's called "complete".
.sig below) usually require some degree of setup/customization and you'll have to be able to work with their template system too (or pay someone to do it for you, usually the CMS vendor or a consultancy based on that CMS). CMS's don't often offer WYSIWYG design/layout tools, which is a lot more complicated than WYSIWYG content editing (hard enough to do well in the browser). So if you're lucky you find a system that allows you to make most of the template stuff in Dreamweaver, and you'll usually have to do a degree of tweaking in the template language itself. This requires learning a template language, and already being proficient in XHTML + CSS. DW users are less likely to be proficient in even XHTML + CSS, since it's such a visual tool, which makes the leap to a CMS a bigger one for those folks.
On another note, a CMS (content management system) can be an option, but it can be an expensive one (ie. time-wise or cost-wise or both). Open Source CMS's (including my own -- see
However, as evidenced by Macromedia's introduction of several content management-related products over the past few years, Dreamweaver doesn't offer near the flexibility a CMS can for web sites that need it.
So basically, if you have the time or money to dedicate to it, a CMS can be rewarding, provided you find one that matches your site's needs. For many sites, a CMS is overkill. On the other hand, for many sites, Dreamweaver is spreading itself way too thin, and a CMS could be just the remedy needed.
putfwd.com - 1GB Free file storage with a twist
We use Oxygen - a java based XML editor that is fairly easy to learn how to use and quite effective. Since its platform agnostic our various Windows, Linux and Mac folks can all use it.
http://www.oxygenxml.com
"The first time I got drunk, I got married. The second time I bought a chimpanzee, after that I stayed sober" Arian Seid
Do you really use CMS for generating static pages for a website? I am not picking a fight, the idea just peaks my interest. email jptechnical@gmail.com if you would be willing to answer a few questions. thanks... good post.
Boredom's not a burden anyone should bear.
I'm not sure about dream weavers templating mechanism. I've used Dreamweaver 4 in commercial developing, but not totaly indepth. I wonder if templating can be accomplished by simple xml+xsl and sabcmd (Salbatron XSL processor) or any other XSL processors?
Giving IE users a taste of their own medicine since 2005 - http://pods.-is-a-geek.net/
He made a huge list there, just look at Bricolage. The whole idea is to generate sites off site and not do CMS live like a lot of system try to do with the PHP/include type of crap. It is a lot of work to set these up at first, but it is amazing what they can do afterwards.
Eric
I've used diff and patch in the past to manage templates in some static HTML pages I was working on. Worked great and I already had the tools installed to boot.
[..]what open source solutions are available to replace Dreamweaver's powerful templating capabilities[..]
Any text editor
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
If you're not familiar with these tools, the learning curve may be somewhat steep, but it's a very powerful method.
Is it just me, or has purpose of dreamweaver templates been completely misconstrued? The purpose of dreamweaver templates in a large website structure is to maintain the integrity of your site while still allowing the non-tech content managers to do their job with dreamweaver or contribute.
Anybody with any real experience maintaining websites is already going to use some sort of template with a server-side script, and if they're smart, they'll use PHP.
So just put the two together. Make your site template using PHP in your favorite text editor, then just make a dreamweaver template that includes your header.php and footer.php, and you're done.
So the only question that remains is timeless: what text editor to use?
bluefish meets my needs.
blosxom is very powerful, very flexible.
Heck, I'm still looking for a good FOSS replacement for the GIMP.
___
It's the end of my comment as I know it and I feel fine.
Yes there is an OSS alternative and it's been around forever... it's called XSLT.
Dreamweaver templating is nothing more than a dumbed down XML metaphor. One can accomplish the same and much more with a good DTD and a well thought out set of XSLT stylesheets.
Additionally, with this approach, you're not really tied to a single langauage/plaform. Also, have the option of statically rendering your pages during the authoring stage, or dynamically on your production environment (that's where the real fun begins!).
If you really need WYSIWYG, you can look into integrating XMLSpy's Authentic or some similar tool into your production workflow.
It's not like Dreamweaver is that complicated a program. I use notepad and do just fine. If you really need an alternitive to Dreamweaver build it yourself, I really don't find it that big a deal.
Depending on what needs to be done, Contemplate might be another option. It doesn't have a "slick" editor (that forces you to write bad HTML 2.0 when you'd rather be doing XHTML+CSS), but it does allow you to render static version of a site if necessary. I looked at some of the other options at the time we switched away from WebObjects (which was overkill for our own stuff), and Contemplate hit our sweet spot better than the alternatives.
There is only one solution to this problem under Linux: Adobe GoLive under Wine. OK, so it's closed source, but OS web design programs have lightyears to catch up before a serious designer can use them.
foo mane padme hum
While the WYSIWYG addicted dreamweaver users can be annoying, the program itself generates code that is usually good enough to satisfy (at least in comparison to other products).
But personally, I'd rather have DW than a text-editor in many cases? Not because I lack the skills at HTML, but because I lack the time. I'd rather have something that allows me to generate my page quickly with a good concept of what it should end up looking like than spend 1.5x the time coding it by HTML.
This whole "dreamweaver is for newbies" argument is willfully simplistic. Speaking from my own extensive web development experience -- Dreamweaver is one tool. It is a very useful and valuable tool. With Dreamweaver I can rapidly prototype sites and knock them into rough shape, much more quickly than I ever could by hand.
But no, Dreamweaver is not a panacea. It doesn't replace a thorough knowledge of web technologies and standards for a professional developer -- html, css, javascript, php, perl, mysql, etc.
Does a carpenter use only one tool to build a house? Of course not.
For the record, I would never use Dreamweaver's templating abilities -- I template server-side. I mix PHP code with Dreamweaver all the time -- just run a local web server to visualize the completed pages. Not that difficult really. That doesn't prevent me from using Dreamweaver regularly or appreciating it for its strengths as part of a large toolbox.
-Aaron
For those who don't already know, the Template Toolkit (TT) is the template presentation engine on which Slashdot runs.
The page that you're looking at right now is generated by TT, as is every other Slashdot page that has been served over the last few years (since Slash version 2.0). So TT may not be the best known technology, but it's been out there helping to build web sites (including some very high profile ones) for a number of years now.
Those who use it tend to swear by it (and occassionally at it), but I'm the guy who wrote it so you can't trust anything I say. :-)
One final point of clarification, TT is a template language written in the Perl programming language, but you don't need to know or learn any Perl to use it. That was one of the original design goals - to allow you to do things like variable substitution, include templates, if/else conditions, loops, etc., using a simple (non-Perl) meta language that web designers and other non-programmers can easily get their heads around. However, it's not just a toy language. It also provides a rich set of hooks for those people who are "real" programmers who want to extend it to interface with back end databases, ecommerce systems, image libraries, or pretty much anything else you can imagine.
Keep simple things simple, and make hard things possible.
The company I work for paid something in the neighborhood of $20,000 for a website to be created by a third party. When we got the website, it was pretty much impossible to maintain without their help. There were hundreds of pages, and most of them were all the same layout, but with slightly different content.
Me ane 1 other person spent 1 month rewriting it in ASP.net. We got it down to 7 pages, and now it's very easy to maintain.
A little work can go a long way.
How about Open Office Templates?
Where are they hiding on the web!?
The real solution is to quit trying to believe the layman computer user wants to jump through all these loops when they can by a vast array of applications for the PC and windows that will provide such features easily.
If you want more consumer (non geeks) to use something other than windows or OSX, then Linux needs to have the app support (Dreamwaver for Linux) and a GUI that is not broke.
Oh yes... and then there is Contribute which is The Right Tool for most of my clients. Read on....
It works like this.
I use Fireworks to draw the navigation bar and header for a page. Fireworks automagically creates all of the rollover images for the buttons and the HTML to slice 'n' dice and then reconstruct the thing. Dreamweaver sucks up the necessary JavaScript to make it all run. (Yes, it's ugly and bloated code but it has no typos, works "first time, every time," and my clients target visitors with broadband connections.)
I drop the header and nav bar into a template and then create the rest of the site based on the template. Easy as pie. The code generated for the rest of the site is quite clean. I'm pleased with the efficiency here.
Later, if I need to add a button to the nav bar, I do the following.
Now for Contribute... I give this to my clients so that they can edit their own web sites. Contribute "locks" the template stuff so that they cannot edit the nav bar, a/k/a cannot break the nav bar.
I'd love to leave Windoze but need something as powerful as Dreamweaver + Templates + Fireworks.
Cheers,
-- Art Z.
Hen's Teeth Network
There's a very good place to find them all, CMSMatrix:
http://www.cmsmatrix.org/
One of the most annoying things about OSS advocates is when they ask "Why would you ever want to do that?" about something no OSS package does well and yet hundreds of thousands of people really do want to "do that" as is evidenced by the continual high sales of Dreamweaver.
It is a critical question before you develop something, you need good answers to that question or else the development is going to flop. If someone asks that question regarding a feature that's important to you, answer them, don't gripe about the question.
----
Open mind, insert foot.
It sounds like a lot of people don't know about Zope Page Templates. I pity them. Maybe not fast enough for slashdot, but.. them zpt "rulez"
Go with a blogging tool like MovableType, which in essence is a great micro-content management tool. It has a database, a templating system, and builds static files. The content owners need not know one iota of markup if you build it the right way.
We use it in several non-blog cases where we are able to use data in much more than static ways... but it's actually static!
I guess it would be nice to choose what rendering engine you'll be able to use within the IDE.
Need a color? Try 100 random colors
You can find OSS alternatives to your "favorite" propietary application in ALTS: alternatives to dreamwaver
How old are you? You don't know how to spell, man.
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