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As a web producer at O'Reilly put it: "I've been waiting to jump into this thread because talking about Dreamweaver and Drupal in the same conversation is like debating which orange juice packaging is the most well built and attractive to consumers vs. a biotech engineer's view of the crop science behind getting maximum yield from your orange tree grove."
While Drupal and Dreamweaver share issues around a split in their communities (CMS developers vs. content producers and designers vs. web developers), the two platforms serve a totally different purpose. The original topic poster pointed out that designers, particularly those who rely on Dreamweaver should be expanding their skill set to include designing for templates used in content management systems.
Dreamweaver has always been more of a design tool or second-pass HTML editor and is not a CMS builder like Drupal. (Drupal is a CMS at a basic level, but when used "properly" it's actually a CMS builder.
The trend in content publishing has been speeding more towards template driven systems (Drupal, Joomla, Wordpress, Movable Type.) Template driven systems are all about standards of transporting and publishing information and are disconnected from the development element of the design process (that's another factor that makes it fairly easy to identify the origin of the out-of-the-box template-driven system used to publish a website.)
Setting aside the potential community issues Drupal has (two distinctly different sets of users, whose goals around furthering Drupal's adoption aren't always in sync -- another topic for another day), there is a serious gap between the design and design development areas of web production and the CMS development areas of web production. Dreamweaver has a similar 'split audience' issue -- designers who use the product to build things according to an artistic vision, totally disconnected from template CMSes,
and web producer types (like those at O'Reilly) who use the product to do second-pass edits and error checks on HTML and CSS ultimately destined to be chopped up into template modules for template driven CMSes.
We'd love to see a product emerge that can address a gap in that area -- for example a design development tool that works hand-in-hand with Drupal. If Adobe wants to increase Dreamweaver's viability, they could develop an expansion pack that works with templatized systems like Drupal -- that anticipates and respects the modular nature of the templates of those platforms and even accommodates core template functionality for test.
Anyone hear of a tool like that?
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There are some Drupal specific extensions being developed for Dreamweaver:
http://xtnd.us/
I had a long thought typed up but realized I'm not even sure what the issue is that's being discussed here, the link provided just returns a page load error as I'm typing this so I can't refer to the original post. But I'm assuming this is about Dreamweaver's WYSIWYG view not acting like a CMS when previewing the design. If this is so, I'll never understand the problem because I don't rely on a WYSIWYG view to begin with. Often I'll create the design in Photoshop with the idea of the final HTML/PHP/CMS product in mind. Then I chop up my needed graphics and start coding. Then I browser test. Since I kept the final platform in mind during the entire process there often is no issue with a design not working. Therefore the guy suggesting that designers expand their skill sets to include template based systems is right. Designers should keep in mind the limitations imposed by the backend that will be serving the pages.
But personally I would be against Adobe creating features in Dreamweaver that targets platforms outside their control. That is just asking for trouble down the road as they would then be forced to do updates to Dreamweaver as the CMS is updated. Which would be annoying to me if I didn't use the CMS in question, unless they let me turn that feature off. Plus they would have to start supporting every major CMS platform in use as well as any that appear in the future.
Dreamweaver is bloated enough, even if I used Dreamweaver I'd probably only use a portion of its features. I'd love to have a Dreamweaver that focused on the coding side of things and dumped the "extra" features they've added over the years. A Dreamweaver Lite if you will.
I'd rather Adobe make sure that Dreamweaver has a plugin architecture that allows the CMS developers create the plugin for their platform on their own. That way the CMS people get the features they want and have no one else to blame if the plugin lags behind development of the CMS.
i don't believe a perfect wysiwyg tool exists that can output valid standards based design layouts that I could code by hand (xhtml is so easy its a joke... describe the content you write by using a predefined set of tags).
I know Dreamweaver comes close but still fails when code needs to be optimal!
Personally I have come to believe that if an individual is expected to design for the web, he/she must at the very least be able to code xhtml/css... How else would a designer understand what is possible if they never bother to understand how it actually works.
Stop wasting time and money on dinosaur print designers and photoshop wizards... If you want to step into my ring you better learn how to dance... Why should my envirnment be bloated with training wheels for lazy ignorant people...
if drupal really wanted to catch my attention they should build tools upon eclipse and makse use of pdt/wst and pherhaps have an internal testing server... Streamline our workflow for the people that matter...
@web lover... laughed at the phrase "dinosaur print designers", don't understand "..photoshop wizards". Are you actually knocking photoshop?
I agree with most of your rant. I see no need for WYSIWYG and dislike Dreamweaver. However, xhtml/css/php/mysql/cms is not the complete picture. In fact, it is no picture at all. I'd say Photoshop is just as critical as any other element in creating a rich, usable, modern web environment. A skilled developer should be able to graphically enrich a well coded web page or at least respect those who have the ability to.
Not sure I'd want to step near your ring if you are going to so arrogantly discount Photoshop and people with Photoshop skills. Using Photoshop with a knowledge of xhtml/css is an essential modern web skill set.
how to view home page in drupal
Hey Rich -
I totally agree with your comments on the original thread, and I think I have just what you are looking for.
Check out the Drupal Dream Theme Utility Suite Dreamweaver Extension, hot off the proverbial press! This is the only comprehensive solution to integrate Drupal theme building with your Dreamweaver work-flow, whether you are a graphic-side designer or a code-side programmer or a little of both. With Design View integration and tons of variables at your disposal: over 30+ different IF statements to wrap content in with a button press, nearly a hundred different Drupal variables all neatly arranged by content type and blank slate templates to build on, this Dreamweaver Component goes a long way to bridge the Drupal Dreamweaver gap.
http://www.dreamweavercomponents.com/
Let me know what you think!
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how to view home page in drupal
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