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

Death... in MY Dreamweaver?

[Anonymous Coward]

I highly doubt this, I check NetCraft daily, and I've seen NO confirmation of Dreamweaver dying!

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?

[Corporate Troll]

Troll? Why is this a Troll? People who actually know what they do don't need hand-holding. I agree: Gimp, Vim and Firebug is all one needs. (Add in a bit Inkscape too)

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 ;-))

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?

[Hurricane78]

I agree with you. There are web developers, and web amateurs. You can see them whining and bitching above.
They think that because they read a HTML book while driving the cab, and wrote 5-liners of JavaScript that you can replace with 10 characters of CSS, that they can call themselves "developers".

And because they live in groups, where everybody is like them, they think this is perfectly OK.

I saw companies where a group of 30 web "developers" decided to call functions a too abstract concept for a 16 million page-views PER DAY site! I saw people editing messy PHP/HTML-pages in Dreamweaver, with the *mouse only*. I saw so much server-side code copypasta inside million-dollar-business websites, that it make would someone at a real software company scream until the end of his life.

No structure, no grasp of basic concepts of engineering, no anything. And when the re-design came, it took them full two weeks including overtime, to change all their code everywhere. While I went home in the middle of the first day, after changing my master-templates. They wanted me to help out. But asked if my simple regular expressions would pose any danger (they thought it was black magic). And they got angry, when I replaced their thousand copies of the content box HTML with function calls to the template.
They needed nearly two years, to cope with it, until they implemented a bad version of it Europe-wide. Of course by then, I was so far in front of them, that it again was black magic to them (I started to program client-side web application clients -- What you would call AJAX today.)

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.

Re:Is Dreamweaver good?

[Ihmhi]

I use Notepad, MS Paint, and my browser to do my web design.

Now get off my lawn you hooligans!

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.

No design needed

[MrEricSir]

It's true, most people who make sites in Drupal, Wordpress, etc. clearly didn't spend more than 10 minutes on the design.

Microsoft is dying, long live McDonalds!

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I doing this right? The whole comparing 2 different things?

Re:Microsoft is dying, long live McDonalds!

[mwvdlee]

It's not even a static/dynamic difference. Dreamweaver is a website design tool, Drupal is a website management tool. A smart person would use both; design the look & feel with Dreamweaver, then convert the design into a Drupal template.

The concept is more generic

[icepick72]

Veryu misleading title. The story isn't about Dreamweaver but the dying of static HTML editing tools of any kind, contrasting them to the changing web. The web is becoming more dynamic. Some HTML editing tools are very static. Therein lies the problem for the old tools.

Re:Content Management System is not a design progr

[f1vlad]

Well, developer has utmost freedom to redesign theme from scratch or mod currently available ones, here are some websites done in drupal, check it out:

• http://www.warnerbrosrecords.com/
• http://change.gov/
• http://community.michaeljackson.com/
• http://ketnet.be/
• http://ngycp.org

more here and here.

I completely agree however, drupal != dreamweaver.

Good riddance.

[jonadab]

I've seen some of the HTML these tools (Frontweaver, Dreampage, HotMetal, etc) produce, and I Do Not Want It.

I use Emacs and w3schools, and my HTML is clean, scalable, efficient, reasonably accessible, and very maintainable, and honestly I don't spend that much time on it. HTML is, fundamentally, very easy, once you know what you're doing.

In terms of keeping all the pages on a site updated with side-wide changes, I mostly use a combination of keyboard macros, custom elisp, Perl, regular expressions, chewing gum, and bailing wire. But it works, and it works the way I *want* it to work.

As far as Drupal, though, I thought that was a CMS. Do people really try to use it as an HTML editor? Ugh.