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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.
vi
... like the body or the subject!)
HTH
HAND
Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment
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).
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.
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.
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!
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 :)
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.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
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'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.
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.
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.)
--GrouchoMarx
Card-carrying member of the EFF, FSF, and ACLU. Are you?
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.
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.