Slashdot Mirror
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.
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
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?
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.