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.

Comments

Includes?

[Klar]

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?

Re:Includes?

[josh3736]

I think you're missing the point -- this is about having an OSS replacement for Dreamweaver Templates. Telling someone who has never edited HTML by hand to just jump in to HTML and PHP with a text editor is not a suitable replacement for Dreamweaver. The point here is to let someone switch without taking a hit in productivity.

Re:Includes?

[abandonment]

and this helps newbies that can't figure out anything but dreamweaver templates how?

perl is the most complicated language for newbies to learn that i've ever found - most dreamweaver newbs will have a hard enough time figuring out php, let alone perl

endless 500 server errors - yeah real 'user friendly' ;p

Re:Includes?

[JPriest]

FYI, I would say peobably most dreamweaver users have edited HTML by hand. The trial and error of editing stuff in a text editor and getting it formated correctly is time consuming. I used code the most hit pages on my website in notepad for speed/bandwidth reasons and do the rest of them in DreamWeaver, because updating a 200+ page webiste with notepad is not fun.

Re:Includes?

[GrouchoMarx]

Telling someone who has never edited HTML by hand to just jump in to HTML and PHP with a text editor is not a suitable replacement for Dreamweaver.

Telling someone who has never edited HTML by hand to just use Dreamweaver and click and drool is not a suitable replacement for someone with a clue. The answer is for people to use WYSIWYG editors only long enough to learn how HTML works, then start writing REAL code. I'm FAR more productive with Kate (glorified text editor/project manager for KDE) than I am with any WYSIWYG editor. If all I knew was Dreamweaver, my pages would be 10x the size, less manageable, and less standards-compliant.

Do the Internet a favor, people! Write your web pages by hand. Web browser authors will thank you, as will your visitors. If it gets to be too many pages, that's what PHP (or hell, ASP or JSP if you must) is for.

(Yes, I'm being an elitist prick about it. But when the quality is so vastly different, it matters. People should be able to USE things without knowing how they work, but not BUILD things without knowing how they work. There is a difference.)

Re:Includes?

[prodangle]

The answer is for people to use WYSIWYG editors only long enough to learn how HTML works, then start writing REAL code.

Dreamweaver is not a tool for 'noobs' who don't know html - it's a tool that massively enhances the productivity of web developers, who generally do know html very well. It automates all the repetitive stuff, like generating tables or imagemaps, and helps with designing layouts, much a good IDE would for writing C/Java/whatever. A basic text editor is fine for putting together a small site, but a tool like dreamweaver helps enourmously with the task of managing a large site.

Re:Includes?

[Zphbeeblbrox]

First of all if your editing 96,000 pages without a content management system then you deserve the headache. If by chance you do have a content management system then it probably uses templating, so you can indeed use Kate to modify the template and then upload it and Bingo you've just edited 96,000 pages. Even really large complex sites get coded and updated in a Text editor. Some of them even get edited in the browser (gasp).

So actually your wrong he probably isn't assuming what you thought he was.

Re:Includes?

[mangu]

As for the find command, that wouldn't find a file three directories up.

You don't know what the find command does, do you? It finds files, as its name implies, up to any level of directories.

That's the beauty of unix. You don't need specialized tools like dreamweaver, because the basic operating system utilities are so flexible and powerful. When you know a few commands, like find and sed, you can create a short line of commands that replace anything your bloatware can do.

Of course, you need a few weeks of study to start being productive in unix, compared to being able to create something with dreamweaver almost immediately. But then you need weeks of study to be truly productive in dreamweaver. And when you want to do something else, the cycle repeats with some other application, while in unix, once you know the commands you can be productive with everything.

Unix has a steep learning curve at the beginning, but the curve flattens out and it becomes very easy to learn new things once you get past the raw beginning. WYSIWYG applications are the opposite, they are very easy in the beginning, but you do have to study them in depth if you want to be a power user, and what you learn in one application is pretty much useless in another. Being a dreamweaver power user won't help you in doing advanced stuff in excel, and vice-versa. But if you learned unix commands to edit html files, you'll know everything you need to edit any text files, no matter what the application is.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

bad idea

[geg81]

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).

Re:bad idea

[Richard_at_work]

Content management systems arent the best idea in all situations. If you are producing a largely static site, but adding content daily, with a large number of users, producing static HTML is better than dragging it out of a database, because it produces a smaller cpu hit on the server. An example I usually give of such a site is local government Intranets, which in the UK are usually highly static data, IE the page doesnt change much, but more pages are added daily. This is fantastic for Dreamweaver, or its non geek friendly cousin Contribute, and their templating functionality, because it allows you to create the entire page once, keeping the cpu hits to a generating client, so when you do want to change the template, you have the client regenerating the site, rather than every hit dragging something out of a database or 'wasting' cpu time on a php include();.

Re:bad idea

[GeorgeMcBay]

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.

OMFG

[RealBeanDip]

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.

dont knock Dreamweaver out of hand

[InfoHighwayRoadkill]

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.

Once again someone misses the point.

[Caine]

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.

Dreamweaver is an incredibly great tool

[ShatteredDream]

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.

The real problem with open source

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:The real problem with open source

[tftp]

It took far more than "two or three years" to switch from CP/M and Lotus to Windows and Excel. And there were earlier mini-computers too, like PDP-11. So we are talking about 10-20 years here. Many programs can be born, used and retired within this time frame.

And besides, there is nothing wrong with reimplementing of commercial software. We have OpenOffice, and who is hurt by that? Nobody, MS included; but now you have more choices.

Businesses take risks and invest into development of new stuff. In return they get to sell the new product, until other people start offering imitations - and some of them will be free; some of them even displace the original product. For example, we do not use light bulbs with carbon filaments, though that's how they were invented. As another example, which browser got the tabbed browsing first? Those who follow the path can afford to look around, and often they see what the first team missed.

Re:The real problem with open source

[tftp]

I don't debate the quality issue. If you pay for something you expect to get something for your money, be it usefulness, performance or support (or maybe just a pleasant feeling...) The main contribution of OpenOffice is not that it is better (whatever that means), but that it is an alternative, and it is up to you to choose.

IMO, some software can not be really developed within F/OSS model. For example take mechanical CADs (since there was a thread on /. today.) To make anything similar to SolidWorks or AI you need to first fork some $millions over to engine developers, and only then you can start wrapping your own logic and UI on top. This is just too expensive; it would take probably the entire effort that was focused into Linux, and that is not very realistic.

Use it for WYSIWYG tables!

[PeeAitchPee]

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.

Re:Wow

[happyemoticon]

My job uses dreamweaver extensively. It's a crime against God and man, plus, as you say, it's pretty hard to learn. In fact, my situation is even worse because we use a 9x version on our XP machines that crashes on an hourly basis.

What concerns me about the templates is that they're an excuse, at least in my experience, for shitty web designers to produce equally shitty, unmaintainable code through a WYSIWYG editor. Includes are a good way to go (catting a file into the output stream does not consume any resources worth mentioning, and it's a bigger waste of resources in the eyes of somebody trying to maintain the code if you have a bunch of redundent HTML). That way, they can just look at the

that they're worried about, and they can even edit that in dreamweaver.

Anyone who uses Dreamweaver and calls themselves a "Web Designer" or a "Webmaster" is a monkey with a typewriter. Tools like that are great for maintaining HTML and making homepages, but not for producing real, clean, standards-compliant code.

Re:Wow

[DaScribbler]

Anyone who uses Dreamweaver and calls themselves a "Web Designer" or a "Webmaster" is a monkey with a typewriter. Tools like that are great for maintaining HTML and making homepages, but not for producing real, clean, standards-compliant code.

Actually, I take this the opposite way. I find that usually people who bag on DW so vehemently are merely people who purchased a couple books on HTML, CSS and PHP then try to pass themselves off as professional web designers. And try to parade their percieved professionalism by loudly implying that Real Web Designers are those who use VI as a text editor and anybody else are mere mortals.

Dreamweaver squashed the 'WYSIWYG tools generate crappy non-standards compliant code' misnomer quite some time ago.

Re:Wow

[martinX]

If your non-technical people have trouble with Contribute, I'm surprised they can make it to work unaided.

Contribute is as easy as pie to use for anyone who can even half-use a word processor. Just remember: it's a webpage editor, not a site editor. Perhaps your site needed to be re-jigged with Contribute in mind, or maybe too many web developer-type tasks were being devolved to them.

And if they couldn't use Contribute, they won't be able to use a CMS. Maybe you just need smarter people.

Re:roll your own

[plasticsquirrel]

Ah, the usual Slashdot "Eh, why don't they just use a dozen awk scripts and sed filters, glued together with some perl programs?"

These same people always seem to express endless frustration when people stay on Windows or Mac instead of Linux. And why shouldn't they when the sort of software they rely on isn't available?

I'm happy on Debian or Slackware writing my own PHP, but I'm the first to admit that this is not for the average folks. There are a lot of web developers who are more "web designers" (these people were often art majors, and don't know a lick of HTML) who focus on artistic design, and for them a WYSIWYG editor is a must.