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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.
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.
I would expect people to still use a visual editor, such as NVU for visual work.
tt2site, which is based on tt2ttree, is currently under-documented, but looks like it could shape up to be a fairly easy to use templating solution, requiring minimal use of the command line. (Until someone writes some GUI hooks to run it from Quanta).
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
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.
This is true, but the problem with this (for the market i demonstrated earlier) is that people want WYSIWYG editing. They want to treat the web page as a word document, they dont want to type stuff into a white box on a screen and press submit every 5 seconds to see what their changes look like. This is where Dreamweaver/Contribute come in.
ACK. All the "small" tools combined into one large UI is the "killer feature" (CSS editor, php and database integration...).
:-)
Sure, you con have them all using rather obscure (to the normal user) command line tools, but thats not the point.
All in one UI working in a decent way is what's lacking on FOSS so far. NVU didn't come close, last time i checked.
Love my linux boxen, though
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...)
Dreamweaver squashed the 'WYSIWYG tools generate crappy non-standards compliant code' misnomer quite some time ago.
Really. Until MX 2004 DW could only handle a subset of CSS reliably. Ever tried designing a page with CSS floats? DW MX 2004 still can't render them properly. As far as CSS layouts are concerned DW isn't even fully WYSIWYG!
Add to that record-breaking bloat, the code view that doesn't receive focus until you click it and a dozen other 'features', I'll stick with Template Toolkit.
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
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.
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