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Dreamweaver Is Dying; Long Live Drupal!

Posted by timothy on from the view-askew dept.

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."

5 of 318 comments (clear)

  1. Is Dreamweaver good? by siDDis · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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?

    1. Re:Is Dreamweaver good? by JCSoRocks · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

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    2. Re:Is Dreamweaver good? by Thinboy00 · · Score: 4, Interesting

      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.

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  2. Content Management System is not a design program by Hottie+Parms · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Dreamweaver's more for coders than designers by weston · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

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