Dreamweaver question

I'm not alone on an island (speaking as a professional, not a DIY) when I say the answer to any Dreamweaver question is: Don't use Dreamweaver.

The main reasons involve clunkiness and ancient means of accomplishing the simplest of tasks, i.e. Adobe still hasn't updated the Javascript code since they took over from Macromedia as evidenced by variables and functions atarting with "MM" - more to the point these days developers use jQuery and VideoJS and HTML5 to accomplish more with less. This, of course, is a broad statement and my opinion. That being said, if you encounter some negativity in responses here in the forum, don't be too surprised.

As to "publish local for sub sites and link them together" - please supply an example and better description, publishing is not normally done to "local", i.e. your sandbox on your computer running a LAMP setup for local development. Usually it's published to a remote site FROM your local. Subsites could mean a lot of different things (multisite format where different sites share docroot, name based virtual hosted sites, or simply a site at x.yourdomain.com and y.yourdomain.com each with unique docroot, etc.)

If you have templates in your Dreamweaver oriented web site(s) than remember that is proprietary so it's okay to export to a remote host, but you're married to Dreamweaver for future edits if you want to maintain automatic link correction between pages, etc., using that template system.

As to video, I am an advocate of coding my own solutions using VideoJS which is an HTML5 JS solution that uses the video tag but is the most cross-browser solution I've seen. It also has easy to use API for developers who like to customize, easy to style, loads fast and handles multiple formats with options to degrade seamlessly if a video format is not supported on the client.

In short, I would not rely on any widgets in Dreamweaver and of course stay away from Flash/Shockwave plugins/extensions to it these days as a primary solution (okay as a fallback in the client browser which VideoJS supports).

SrWebDeveloper said:

I'm not alone on an island (speaking as a professional, not a DIY) when I say the answer to any Dreamweaver question is: Don't use Dreamweaver.

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Which Mac software do you recommend using?

SrWebDeveloper said:

...the answer to any Dreamweaver question is: Don't use Dreamweaver.

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Though good for a chuckle on this site, not very good advice. DW gets a lot of sneers from hipsters who think hand-coding is somehow better, but it is a pretty powerful tool -- when you know how to use it.

SrWebDeveloper said:

The main reasons involve clunkiness and ancient means of accomplishing the simplest of tasks... This, of course, is a broad statement and my opinion.

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You should check out some of the newer versions. jQuery: check. CSS3 media queries: check. HTML5: check. (I know most people on MR have written off DW, but we shouldn't keep talking about it like it hasn't changed since CS1)

SrWebDeveloper said:

If you have templates in your Dreamweaver oriented web site(s) than remember that is proprietary so it's okay to export to a remote host, but you're married to Dreamweaver for future edits if you want to maintain automatic link correction between pages, etc.,

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Not true. DW templates are an author-time convention; the resulting HTML simply has comments in it; ignored by other editors.

SrWebDeveloper said:

stay away from Flash/Shockwave plugins/extensions to it these days as a primary solution...

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Nothing wrong with those as the primary and HTML5/jQuery as the fallback while more users* are on desktops than mobile.

*I'm discounting kids using facebook & twitter on mobile devices, which is the vast majority of mobile traffic, and often quoted by statisticians

There's nothing wrong with using Dreamweaver provided you're doing the coding yourself. I don't use the interface, just all hand coding.

cbott said:

Which Mac software do you recommend using?

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Aptana or Komodo are fantastic professional IDE's to name just two. Both offer advanced features for doing all you said, plus team oriented CVS for both GIT and SVN, live file sharing, support for all the popular languages including all those discussed here, and many template systems such as RHTML, Template-Toolkit, HTML-Smarty and Django. The interfaces are much better organized and customizable and many more plugins available to extend functionality. Both are also actually cross platform compatible as well, so if one gig your PM gives you a MBP and another consultant job a PC, no sharp learning curve. And if you're working on your own Mac, both are stable, cache superbly and don't abuse your RAM.

RE: UTclassof89

I read all your comments, one by one. You're right on every count, technically. I think you missed what I was getting at -- big picture, DW makes for lazy developers, it should be a tool used to enhance code, not create it. There are too many buttons and a steep learning curve associated with the IDE compared to more elegant solutions by the competition.

HTML is the core of what we do as Web Designers/Developers so use that not a button or a menu item.

One important note about the templating system - while convenient and powerful and (as you noted) it exports professionally -- the issue comes when a client wants changes affecting layout and embedded links AFTER the initial launch, when you might have moved on to other gigs and technology stacks. You'll lose all the editable regions and child pages and have to take numerous additional steps to resolve issues and make changes. DIY's working one the same site, no issue. Professionals - they deal with real world issues where exported template based sites with hundreds of pages are marked as changed by the server resulting in increasing the size of incremental backups AND out of sync pages. Your PM will want you to move elements out of HTML and back into code for dynamic inclusion without being married to one methodology. Other template systems involve language constructs in this way integrated into the HTML so that frequent updating of content is smoother, believe me.

As happens in the professional world, which is and has been the content of my replies here. Never did I say DW doesn't have its audience. The reason I'm not debating point by point is because I freely admit if one is willing, one will love it. But I hope the points I raised offer a different perspective from a point of view shared by many for very valid reasons. Not just to bash for the fun of it.

burnsranch said:

Seniorwebdeveloper. I apoligize....

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Oh, please, no need to do that - this forum is for exchanging ideas, no single answer is always correct and no single developer/designers has the same needs and experience. I appreciate you explaining your situation, and based on that the newer DW (hoping your license permits you without spending any or too much hard earned cache) might be perfect for your needs. I noted two alternatives which happen to be great for Mac, and you can download trials and experiment. Otherwise absorb what I said and wait for others to chime in, they might recommend something I am completely unaware of, who knows! Thanks for writing me.