Dreamweaver CS5 – A Coder’s Dream come true?
Reviewed by Robert L Pritchett
Introduction
This application is about the “last man standing” for
professional What-You-See-is-What-You-Get web design with little to no
competition. (Think BBEdit, for hand-coders.)
What I Learned
I was able to install CS5 this time, without having to uninstall
CS4 first. Once I felt comfortable with CS5, I uninstalled CS4. Only a few
folders and apps stuck around and I had to remove them by hand. At least this
time, the new install didn’t overwrite the old ones and created new folders
accordingly, causing both CS3 and CS4 to ungracefully fail. The engineers did
the install app correctly this time.
In spite of the “No Flash” glove thrown down by Apple
Corporation in May and subsequent revisions of certain training videos on the
Adobe site on using Flash in a Macintosh environment, the Dreamweaver upgrade
includes “Plan B”, of supporting the draft of HTML 5. There has been one update so far to Dreamweaver, since
installation. By taking advantage of the Adobe Extension Manager, functionality
improves. However as new extensions are added, they tend to upset the
cross-pollination cycles with the other apps in the CS5 Suite. For example, I
attempted to gather the HTML 5 tag extension and install it and was notified by
the Extension Manager that I already had newer updates and did I really want to
replace them? I backed out. At least I had a choice to proceed or not. I had
forgotten that I had already downloaded the HTML5 Pack - http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/html5pack/
I use Dreamweaver mostly for site management. When I do
pages, I spend an awful lot of my time cleaning out scruff and fluff inserted
by Adobe code. However, I like it because of the ability it has of removing MS
Word scruff that comes with converting MS Word to Web pages, so I tolerate it.
Perhaps I need to experiment more with converting Apple Pages to the web
instead or use NeoOffice, but I’m lazy enough to let it ride, for now. I use a
method for the on-line magazine that works. My other immediate choice is to use
WordPress instead or go back to BBEdit. I have not made that deliberate move,
because I like using Dreamweaver. It is a gas-guzzling Cadillac, but it
provides a relatively smooth ride. It gives me some street credibility in web
development circles and I can wear it as a geek badge in IT groups.
What Adobe did to keep me close, was to provide integration
into other Content Management Systems like WordPress, Jumla, Drupal, etc. so I
would not wander too far away. You might want to use Adobe’s own CMS,
Contribute - http://www.adobe.com/products/contribute/ I was unable to access my website using it, because I use SFTP and for some
reason, it isn’t smart enough to ask for the port address I use. Apparently I’m
not alone, because I see no other Mac-based reviews of CS5 Contribute. My web
host refuses to allow Contribute to play nice. Earlier versions I attempted to
use in the past, were also challenging.
One of our columnists uses MS Word that is full of styles
and I have to strip those out along with empty anchors constantly from his
submittals. It drives me nuts. Changing his input to Pages and then saving back
to MS Word before conversion to Web pages doesn’t destroy the underlying hidden
code either. Sometimes I let it slide and as a result, certain pages on the
site tend to have too much coding overhead inside them.
(Use of multiple fonts should be acceptable, but online, I
find them to be a distraction for information-only sites, while they seem to be
fine for hard-copy or PDFing.)
By taking advantage of the BrowserLab, I can immediately see
whether or not my pages need special help with other browsers, besides Safari.
I find that to be of immense help and a time-saver.
It would appear that Adobe is moving rapidly to a
cloud-based, fee-based (to me, a disturbing trend) computing experience. But I
will use the beta (for now) apps until Adobe asks for more monthly money. Apple
also seems to be trending towards cloud computing and that particular monthly
pay-as-you-go revenue source as well. I do not appreciate being
nickel-and-dimed.
This might be fun – The Widget Browser – using
Adobe AIR.
http://tv.adobe.com/watch/learn-dreamweaver-cs5/using-the-widget-browser/
Apparently, Adobe bought Business Catalyst http://businesscatalyst.com/, so the
add-ins for eCommerce are now internal to Adobe instead of being 3rd-party
apps.
Conclusion
If you have never used Dreamweaver for website development
or management, then getting this latest version will make life much easier. If
you have Adobe CS4 and do not use PHP or JavaScript, stay with what you have
already.
