Dreamweaver Is Dying; Long Live Drupal!

Barence writes "Here's an interesting blog post by a designer who reckons Dreamweaver is dying. It's not Dreamweaver's fault, though. Nor is the problem Adobe and its development team — the last Dreamweaver CS4 version was the most impressive release in years. Moreover, although Microsoft Expression Web poses a far more credible threat than FrontPage could muster, Dreamweaver remains the best HTML/CSS page-based editor available. The real problem for Dreamweaver and for its users is that the nature of the web is changing dramatically."

Comments

Is Dreamweaver good?

[siDDis]

I've never tried it, when I do web design I do it with Gimp, Vim and Firebug. And I think that combo works great!

How do Dreamweaver compare to Vim? Is it advanced enough to not fool users to use css styled text for strong expressions?

Re:Is Dreamweaver good?

[JCSoRocks]

Dreamweaver is a great tool. I've been using it almost since it came out. (It and Future Splash, a.k.a Flash.) I've never used the "designer" type tools in dreamweaver. I've always seen it as a really powerful development environment for building sites. The Site concept and integrated FTP / server management are great. Code hints are obviously convenient and I've always appreciated how granular the code coloring / formatting is. The CSS tools are invaluable for tracking down those times when things are cascading a bit differently than you'd like. I'm also a huge fan of the search / replace tools in Dreamweaver for refactoring. The ability to scan across a selection, open document, all open documents, or an entire site is really handy. I realize text editors have similar abilities but the Site concept makes scanning across countless directories a no-brainer.

There's gobs more but those are the first things that come to mind.

Re:Is Dreamweaver good?

[SocialEngineer]

Since we've got licenses for it at my day job, I use it as my preferred webdev/design IDE. It works fairly well for that sort of thing, but it's a bit of overkill for me (I'm not working on collab projects). Of course, I hand code everything. I'll say this much; it's a fast, responsive IDE regarding its UI, code highlighting, and more. When I'm doing my independent work, though, I usually use Geany for my coding, since it's multiplatform.

As a CMS, yeah, it's not very widely used anymore; why would someone use it, with so many CMS options available? A web based system is much, much more efficient, especially regarding cost. Anything that requires a software client, especially anything which requires paid licenses, is just asinine, in my professional opinion.

Re:Is Dreamweaver good?

[Thinboy00]

I later realized, that such types only get their jobs, because their bosses are such types too. Up to the owner of the company. Which is the only person of the company in many cases.
And then they only have to live up to the clients' expectations. Of course the client never knows, that you could save him 90% of the cash by actually using real programming concepts like re-usability and modularity.

Next time anyone gets fired from a job due to their boss's incompetence, please tell a tabloid about how much money you could save them. And back it up with a slashdot/dailywtf story so the technocracy (i.e. the slashdot etc. community) will know that the (un)published story is in fact grounded in fact, or at least is valid and/or sound.

Please do this, so that we can all have something funny to read, and so that the client has some clue that he's being ripped off by a salesman who is too stupid to even take advantage of the high price.

To mods:No, this is not, in fact, sarcastic.

Re:Is Dreamweaver good?

[SoupIsGoodFood_42]

A designer might need Dreamweaver, but that's most likely because he doesn't know the underlying structures. Now, I admit, the Designer-Tech profile is quite seldom though ;-))

All the good web designers I know do their own HTML and CSS. Although in bigger places, the design and implementation in to code may be split. But Dreamweaver has been dead for a while to most decent web designers.

Content Management System is not a design program

[Hottie Parms]

Drupal et al make life a whole lot easier when it comes to updating a website and adding content. But what about the design?

Unless you want to stick to the default Drupal (or insert CMS here) themes, you'll probably want to design your own CMS template so people get a unique feel for your website. You'll still need to fall back on your classic static web-design skills using programs like Dreamweaver (or notepad).

Dreamweaver isn't dying, it's just falling into a more specialized category now. If you just used Dreamweaver as a way to update content, then you were really failing to use the program to it's full potential.

Re:Microsoft is dying, long live McDonalds!

[uniquename72]

Yes, the reasons for using each are very different. If your site is dynamic, Drupal is great. If your site is static, Dreamweaver is a really good tool. While it may seem that more and more sites are becoming dynamic, I'd argue that there are still -- and will always remain -- a very large number of static sites cared for by single developers that have no need of a CMS.

I know it's popular here to bash wysiwig editors (just write the code, dammit!), but Dreamweaver has gotten MUCH better since version 4.

It's code is good, it works well with Flash, CSS and JavaScript. And if you're a designer, the Photoshop integration is pretty fantastic. Personally, I use Dreamweaver primarily for the site management tools, which are also very good.

If you haven't used DW in the past 4 years, then you haven't used DW.

Re:Adapt, don't die...and even MS has the solution

[risk one]

Point Sharepoint Designer to a Sharepoint site where you have required permissions, and have fun.

Fun? You must be joking. I've worked a lot with Sharepoint Designer and it's the most ungodly abomination of a software package I've ever had to touch. It makes the rest of Microsoft's applications look like they were made by NASA.

The whole of Sharepoint is gargantuan mess, from the half implemented API to the ridiculous, overcomplicated, undocumented deployment procedures (restarting the webserver every time you change code, really?), to the insane use of tables in the HTML (have a look at the html on an average system page, and see if your mind can deal with five or six tables wrapped around every single design element).

Sharepoint Designer is where you can really see Sharepoint for what it is. It has all these features that sound very nice, until you try to save an .aspx page and it replicates your previous change somewhere rather than the one you were currently checking in. You think "huh that's weird", delete, the extra code, rewrite the code you wanted to add, and check in again, and now the previous change appears three times. In the end the only solution is to delete the page and the associated content types from the site and create it again (and any pages that used it). That's the sort of wonderful behavior you can expect from Sharepoint Designer.

I've never used the WYSIWYG editor because, frankly, I'm scared.

Dreamweaver's more for coders than designers

[weston]

A designer might need Dreamweaver

Anyone doing design (artwork rather than page layout) isn't going to use Dreamweaver. It's great as a WYSIWYG html editor. From a design standpoint, it doesn't do much else. No raster or vector creation (unless you've decided to try the Celik CSS polygon method).

The only people I know who still use it are coders who find the extra features it provides in terms of editing and site management useful. In this sense, the article is quite correct -- Drupal and Wordpress and other software are eating away at the market that used to see Dreamweaver as the option for editing webpages without knowing HTML. Now CMSs do that.

Given that Dreamweaver really isn't a design tool either, usefulness as an IDE is pretty much the last thing Dreamweaver really has going for it.