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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.
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.
and the authors suggestion to use Perl is better then PHP and HTML in what way?
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
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.
XSLT is the most obvious and powerful way to make templating for webpages.
perception is reality
I'm the author, and I'm a professional Perl programmer. I prefer Perl because I know Perl better.
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 :)
I agree with that, Dreamweaver was the first Web Development tool I used and it was very good at helping me learn how to code HTML and Javascript and really helped me think more about how I was designing my site rather than worring about the nuts and bolts of actually coding it.
However after a year or so of using Dreamweaver I just found it easier to use a text editor to type up the HTML and write some Perl or PHP to deal with putting the pages together, when I was using Dreamweaver I could see how using templates would be useful but found in practice they were normally more trouble than they were worth. It was when I stopped using Dreamweaver that the idea of templates was most useful re-implemented as scripts.
I think the ideal solution nowadays is a good CMS solution, there are lots of good Open Source ones to choose from which can be easily tailored to your requirements and if nothing is suitable it's worth the effort of writing something which does do exactly what you want it to do. For the same price as kitting your self or your team out with Dreamweaver I am sure you can hire someone to provide you with an effective CMS.
Unfortunately the slowness isn't necessarily WINE's fault. When we installed the latest update to DWMX at my old job (it might not be the latest available), it became horribly slow. Especially when switching from another application to DWMX. We saw similar reports of this on the intarweb.
This was on WindowsXP by the way.
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.
In general, I've made two predictions about the success of a product that I was really really sure of in my professional life:
... the rest is history. For what it's worth, I use Dreamweaver for the majority of my HTML creation. It's relatively fast, easy, and powerful, and I say this as someone who hasn't worked at Macromedia for more than three years now.
1. While working at Berkeley Systems, I remember the first time I saw a prototype of You Don't Know Jack. So wait, it's a quiz-show format with a 'host' that insults you? Yeah, that's going to sell. End result: YDKJ is the only product that survived BSI's ending, having gone on to become physical games and even, shortly, a TV show;
2. While working at Macromedia, I remember seeing the first Dreamweaver demos. Now, I'd seen other WYSIWYG HTML editors -- you know, HotMetal (however it's capitalized) and Frontpage. They sucked. People who really cared about their HTML used vi (or vim or Emacs) like God intended them to! And anyway, *HOW* much were we going to charge for this? Insanity! Dreamweaver's going to be the biggest commercial failure in our history!
And
There are friends of mine who have asked me to let them know next time I'm sure a product's going to fail, just in case they've got some money they can invest in it.
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.
(it's just a silly hack) - use realtime HTML, CSS and Javascript preview :)
but last I checked even version 0.70 won't let you start by default using XHTML 1.1 rather than HTML 4.0.
Which web browser with at least 20 percent market share can make sense of conforming XHTML? No, Appendix C is not the answer.
Hey Mark, I'm really surprised that you didn't explore something like Smarty or PEAR templates. Put it on a development machine with rewrite, then when you're done, just copy the whole tree to the real server, and BAM, static site that is as easy to update as a dynamic one.
Dan
Put identity in the browser.
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.
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
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/
They use huge piles of static files for performance, but that doesn't mean that each one is created by hand. Considering how trivial it is to create a simple templated CMS to generate the page, anyone who even attempted to do that by hand is an idiot. In fact, I'd say that any site that has over 10 pages with similar styling that might ever have to be updated should always use some form of a CMS, even if the CMS is only a short perl script that reads in a template, reads the file to be added, applies the template, and writes the html (perhaps 10 lines of code). To change the styling, update the template and rebuild the site. Not all that different from Dreamweaver's handling, except you don't have to reupload the entire site again, and its easier to add dynamic elements.
If you're not familiar with these tools, the learning curve may be somewhat steep, but it's a very powerful method.