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.

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[Anonymous Coward]

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HTH

HAND

Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)

Errm, sorry to say that, but it's 2005 allready...

[Qbertino]

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. ;-)