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Open Source Alternatives to Dreamweaver Templating 322

Posted by timothy from the shirinking-gap dept.
comforteagle writes "One of the greatest hurdles for people wishing to 'switch' to FOSS and Linux is finding a good replacement tool for what they are accustomed to using. In Open Source Alternatives to Dreamweaver Templating Mark Stosberg investigates what open source solutions are available to replace Dreamweaver's powerful templating capabilities." Update: 01/09 by J : Hey, just for the record, Template Toolkit, which provides the solution Mr. Stosberg settles on, also powers much of Slashdot.
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Open Source Alternatives to Dreamweaver Templating More

Open Source Alternatives to Dreamweaver Templating

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  • Wow (Score:2, Interesting)

    by willscott ( 674036 ) *
    I find it pretty amazing that dreamweaver templates are still being used. My school started with templates and found them too buggy and complicated so we switched to contribute. Now we're in the process of going to a CMS, because the non technical people who need to change the site are still having too many problems editing. The tech department was forced to hire a consultant just to teach everyone first how to use dreamweaver, and then contribute.
    • A CMS allows you to have anyone update the site because you trade in some flexibility for simplicity.

      Some people are better off with AOL, others just need a TCP/IP pipe.

    • Re:Wow (Score:5, Insightful)

      by happyemoticon ( 543015 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @07:07PM (#11300084) Homepage

      My job uses dreamweaver extensively. It's a crime against God and man, plus, as you say, it's pretty hard to learn. In fact, my situation is even worse because we use a 9x version on our XP machines that crashes on an hourly basis.

      What concerns me about the templates is that they're an excuse, at least in my experience, for shitty web designers to produce equally shitty, unmaintainable code through a WYSIWYG editor. Includes are a good way to go (catting a file into the output stream does not consume any resources worth mentioning, and it's a bigger waste of resources in the eyes of somebody trying to maintain the code if you have a bunch of redundent HTML). That way, they can just look at the

      that they're worried about, and they can even edit that in dreamweaver.

      Anyone who uses Dreamweaver and calls themselves a "Web Designer" or a "Webmaster" is a monkey with a typewriter. Tools like that are great for maintaining HTML and making homepages, but not for producing real, clean, standards-compliant code.

      • Re:Wow (Score:2, Insightful)

        by DaScribbler ( 701492 )
        Anyone who uses Dreamweaver and calls themselves a "Web Designer" or a "Webmaster" is a monkey with a typewriter. Tools like that are great for maintaining HTML and making homepages, but not for producing real, clean, standards-compliant code.

        Actually, I take this the opposite way. I find that usually people who bag on DW so vehemently are merely people who purchased a couple books on HTML, CSS and PHP then try to pass themselves off as professional web designers. And try to parade their percieved profes

        • I agree wholeheartedly. In fact, using DW can HELP you make sure your code is completely standards-compliant. On top of that, writing extensions is really easy. I wrote several to add checks for handicapped acessibility. I'd rather have DW handle the easy stuff for me. If it's something more involved I just hit source view and edit there. Heck, it's even got a regexp seach/replace which is invaluable.

        • Re:Wow (Score:2, Informative)

          by onlyjoking ( 536550 )

          Dreamweaver squashed the 'WYSIWYG tools generate crappy non-standards compliant code' misnomer quite some time ago.

          Really. Until MX 2004 DW could only handle a subset of CSS reliably. Ever tried designing a page with CSS floats? DW MX 2004 still can't render them properly. As far as CSS layouts are concerned DW isn't even fully WYSIWYG!

          Add to that record-breaking bloat, the code view that doesn't receive focus until you click it and a dozen other 'features', I'll stick with Template Toolkit.

          • I love Dreamweaver and have since version 1.2 but you're dead right about CSS. Fucking Frontpage(!) has a better design view of non-static CSS2 positioning. I have to say that MX2004 added some really great CSS features and is generally an improvement over the sluggishness of 6.0.

            The biggest dissapointment though is the absolutely shitty ASP.NET support. Them forcing me to use a closed and proprietary assembly for data access and operations has relegated it to design - instead of development - status for m

      • Re:Wow (Score:2)

        by deft ( 253558 )
        I have made several fortune 500 websites using dreamweaver. A few were heavy on JSP, some were static, all were very well designed and easy to maintain. They were even compliant.

        Maybe you're getting you info and opinion from 10 years ago when it wasn't as good. But in the real design world compliant code is only interesting to people like you. The people who get paid to do it need it to render in a % of borwsers we are targetting as decided by our demographic. If compliant code didnt render in IE, there wo
      • ...in the hands of a competent web designer, who knows how to use Dreamweaver and how to produce maintainable html/css/whatever without it, Dreamweaver can save a fair bit of time on the visual bits of layout etc. while still spitting out clean and compliant code.

        I worked on a 3000+ page static site, and without DW & Templates, that summer would have been hell on earth. At the end though, we finished early and had a site that's still in use today for a large UK university both internally and externally
      • It also depends on what you're working with. I work with html tables since we publish a lot of print publications with education data online, and dreamweaver makes working with html tables a lot easier. I generally never use the WYSIWYG part of dreamweaver, since it's completely worthless, and just switch to source code view most of the time. It's really handy for visualizing stuff and making sure you're not doing anything wrong.

        I haven't really found a good OSS replacement for this, but Bluefish does p

      • Anyone who uses Dreamweaver and calls themselves a "Web Designer" or a "Webmaster" is a monkey with a typewriter. Tools like that are great for maintaining HTML and making homepages, but not for producing real, clean, standards-compliant code.


        I've produce clean, standards-complaint code with dreamweaver templates. I eventually gave it up for a homebrew XML pipelining tool (far more powerful) but dreamweaver's templates are decent.

    • Re:Wow (Score:3, Insightful)

      by martinX ( 672498 )
      If your non-technical people have trouble with Contribute, I'm surprised they can make it to work unaided.

      Contribute is as easy as pie to use for anyone who can even half-use a word processor. Just remember: it's a webpage editor, not a site editor. Perhaps your site needed to be re-jigged with Contribute in mind, or maybe too many web developer-type tasks were being devolved to them.

      And if they couldn't use Contribute, they won't be able to use a CMS. Maybe you just need smarter people.

  • vi (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 08, 2005 @06:04PM (#11299581)
    vi

    HTH

    HAND

    Cat got your tongue? (something important seems to be missing from your comment ... like the body or the subject!)

    • Re:vi (Score:3, Interesting)

      by CrankyFool ( 680025 )
      In general, I've made two predictions about the success of a product that I was really really sure of in my professional life:
      1. While working at Berkeley Systems, I remember the first time I saw a prototype of You Don't Know Jack. So wait, it's a quiz-show format with a 'host' that insults you? Yeah, that's going to sell. End result: YDKJ is the only product that survived BSI's ending, having gone on to become physical games and even, shortly, a TV show;
      2. While working at Macromedia, I remember seeing
  • I've given more than one open source content management solution a spin and IMHO, LogiCreate [logicreate.com] does a better job than most at form-content separation. I think their business model is to give away most parts but then charge for the web-store component, but go check it our for yourself: www.logicreate.com [logicreate.com]
    • The majority of development has moved over to a subproject on the logicampus project on sourceforge. sf.net/projects/logicampus [sf.net] . Feel free to post any questions over there - the main .com site is not being updated much, although that may change in the next few months.

      What are some of the pros/cons you saw in LC compared to other projects? Mostly curious here, but it's nice to get that kind of unsolicited plug on /. here. :)

  • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
    Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • I do - and for what I believe are good reasons.

      Dreamweaver templating is not the end-all, be-all of web design, but it is a very good solution to the problems of wedding design and relatively static content. Needs vary by project, but usually, I am required to focus on the look of the material (demands of the job) as opposed to the actual content.

      The templating system helps in that it is convenient and it is done on my workstation, where I have the maximum of control, vs. on the server, which is someone e

  • bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)

    by geg81 ( 816215 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @06:07PM (#11299613)
    Dreamweaver templates are a bad idea, from the dark ages of the web. If you are still generating sites by hand, you can do something fairly simple with PHP and CSS or one of the Apache modules/filters.

    A better solution is to use a content management system (CMS).

    • Re:bad idea (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Richard_at_work ( 517087 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @06:15PM (#11299674)
      Content management systems arent the best idea in all situations. If you are producing a largely static site, but adding content daily, with a large number of users, producing static HTML is better than dragging it out of a database, because it produces a smaller cpu hit on the server. An example I usually give of such a site is local government Intranets, which in the UK are usually highly static data, IE the page doesnt change much, but more pages are added daily. This is fantastic for Dreamweaver, or its non geek friendly cousin Contribute, and their templating functionality, because it allows you to create the entire page once, keeping the cpu hits to a generating client, so when you do want to change the template, you have the client regenerating the site, rather than every hit dragging something out of a database or 'wasting' cpu time on a php include();.
      • I think that if you are considering CMS for a largely static site you would consider choosing one which did produce static pages and only regenerated them when a new change was put into the system - which if it's largely static won't be that often.

        • Re:bad idea (Score:3, Informative)

          by Richard_at_work ( 517087 )
          This is true, but the problem with this (for the market i demonstrated earlier) is that people want WYSIWYG editing. They want to treat the web page as a word document, they dont want to type stuff into a white box on a screen and press submit every 5 seconds to see what their changes look like. This is where Dreamweaver/Contribute come in.
          • The heart of a CMS is a database and there is no reason why you can't use no web based tools to update or create your content.

            The last CMS I wrote for work I found it a lot easier to just write a front end using MS Access forms where I could produce a responsive WYSIWYG environment quite easily.

            Taking things a bit further you can basically provide any kind of editing facility you like based on tools like Word or whatever.
            • Yes but the point here is that Dreamweaver presents the ENTIRE webpage to you, but only allows you to edit the non template part. So their menus, site headers and footers, static cross page content is all there, and they can see how their changes relate to the entire page. Thats whats being discussed here, and what you are talking about is basically no different than using Dreamweaver and DW templates. Thats whats missing from the opensource arena at the moment, and its slightly different from the functi
              • The best tool for a job depends on the particular job you want to do.

                I can see how Dreamweavers Templates benefit you in the scenario you are describing - a situation where your editors need to see the whole page but can't be allowed to make changes to anything other than their particular area. I agree there is no direct OSS alternative to this ( which I am aware of at least ).

                In your original scenario of a Local Government Intranet however I really do think a tailored CMS would be a better solution.

                I ca
                • My origional scenario was just a live world example that I know of, but Dreamweaver templates scores victories for small to medium companies, charitable organisations and other non profit groups who dont want to spend out on a professional fulltime webdesigner, or webspace that includes mysql/php, when they can get the whole job done in a copy of Dreamweaver, and upload it as static webpages, usually to ISP provided webspace. Theres also a whole realm of sites out there that have no purpose being database

          • (it's just a silly hack) - use realtime HTML, CSS and Javascript preview [fundisom.com] :)

      • A nice middle road between fully dynamic and fully static is putting a cache in between.. Certain CMS systems (ie Plone) are fully dynamic, but integrate nicely with a proxy/cache that can serve up the generated pages without having to hit the backend database every time..

        Granted, it is a bit more complex of a setup, but in may ways, it provides the best of both worlds.

      • HTML is better than dragging it out of a database, because it produces a smaller cpu hit on the server.

        A Content Management System provides a good deal more than a repository. You need to know when the last time a page was updated and who updated it. You need a version control system to know what changes were made. You need some kind of work flow to move a page from development to review to final approval and track the status of a page in the process.

        A database application on the backend makes it a good

      • IE the page doesnt change much

        A small request. Use i.e. or ie or alike. Not all-caps IE. Especially in HTML-related texts. It's confusing.
    • I can see absolutely no point in the few web pages I have, largely static data that only gets updated once every week or two, to build it around PHP or scripting of any kind. For a static page, it's simply a waste of resources to have the thing generated by a script.

    • Re:bad idea (Score:3, Insightful)

      by GeorgeMcBay ( 106610 )
      One of the most annoying things about OSS advocates is when they ask "Why would you ever want to do that?" about something no OSS package does well and yet hundreds of thousands of people really do want to "do that" as is evidenced by the continual high sales of Dreamweaver.

  • OMFG (Score:2, Insightful)

    by RealBeanDip ( 26604 )
    People using Dreamweaver aren't going to switch over to ANYTHING remotely resembling "ttree" and use Perl to pre-process their HTML... OMFG, I'M ROTFLM - phew, that was a lot of acronyms.

    However, IMNSHO, there is nothing that comes close to Dreamweaver (and it's templating) in the FOSS world that I've found. NVU, which is an excellent tool is about as close as I've seen.

    As much of a raging POS as dreamweaver is, it still remains popular for that reason.

    For anything beyond a few pages, I'm finding PHP and

    • Re:OMFG (Score:5, Informative)

      by markjugg ( 21992 ) * <<mark> <at> <summersault.com>> on Saturday January 08, 2005 @06:28PM (#11299768) Homepage
      As the author, you missed a key point in the article. It's not about alternatives to Dreamweaver, it's an alternative to the way Dreamweaver implements templating.

      I would expect people to still use a visual editor, such as NVU [nvu.com] for visual work.

      tt2site [squirrel.nl], which is based on tt2ttree, is currently under-documented, but looks like it could shape up to be a fairly easy to use templating solution, requiring minimal use of the command line. (Until someone writes some GUI hooks to run it from Quanta).

  • dont knock Dreamweaver out of hand (Score:5, Insightful)

    by InfoHighwayRoadkill ( 454730 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @06:11PM (#11299638) Homepage
    When I was starting out I used Dreamweaver all the time. It was fine for small sites that didn't need too many updates. It also taught me the basics of html once I learned to press the view source button a few times.

    The templates came in very handy when I moved onto doing larger static sites. They made keeping a consistent look and feel easy, especially when combined with CSS. As they do not need any server side technology they can be very useful.

    But nothing will compete in the long run with server side technologies. It doesn't matter which one as they all do essentially the same job. But there is a huge learning curve that many people do not want to try to overcome. (I can remeber telling my PHB that he could use Dreamweaver like Word, I spent a lot of time cleaning up after him though)

    Dreamwever and even Front Page and the like have been invaulable in getting large numbers of people creating their own web based material and probably have a far higher impact in this area than they are given credit for by some professional developers. An alternative that is open source and *good* would be a killer app for linux. Its all very well saying "learn to do it properly and use vi to write your code" for the average user the experience of seeing a web page being generated is something akin to magical and they would run a mile from a text editor.
    • I agree with that, Dreamweaver was the first Web Development tool I used and it was very good at helping me learn how to code HTML and Javascript and really helped me think more about how I was designing my site rather than worring about the nuts and bolts of actually coding it.

      However after a year or so of using Dreamweaver I just found it easier to use a text editor to type up the HTML and write some Perl or PHP to deal with putting the pages together, when I was using Dreamweaver I could see how using t
    • Dreamwever and even Front Page and the like have been invaulable in getting large numbers of people creating their own web based material I, for one, do not view this as a good thing. The simplicity of using dreamweaver or Front Page causes people who have no sense of web design to create atrocious pages, which I am forced daily to trudge through. Not to mention the horrible code that these generators create.
    • Dreamwever and even Front Page and the like have been invaluable in getting large numbers of people creating their own web based material ...

      Why spend $400, when you can get a perfectly good html editor for nothing with Mozilla? The editor has three or four tabs which display varying levels of code, from WYSIWYG to plain text, so you can use the GUI and see the tags even if you are stuck on Windoze.

      Those looking to move up in the world can try out Bluefish and Quanta. Bluefish is an excellent html edito

  • Once again someone misses the point. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Caine ( 784 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @06:13PM (#11299658)
    Once again someone misses the point. The "Killer Feature" isn't the templates. The killer feature is templates coupled with the editor & kitchen-sink that is Dreamweaver. By themselves they're nothing special.

  • Dreamweaver is an incredibly great tool (Score:5, Insightful)

    by ShatteredDream ( 636520 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @06:17PM (#11299684) Homepage
    And there really is nothing that is OSS that can compete against it right now. Nvu is slowly becoming usable, but last I checked even version 0.70 won't let you start by default using XHTML 1.1 rather than HTML 4.0. Tools like WYSIWYG web pager designer tools are going to be important to making OSS viable with many businesses and home users.

    • but last I checked even version 0.70 won't let you start by default using XHTML 1.1 rather than HTML 4.0.

      Which web browser with at least 20 percent market share can make sense of conforming XHTML? No, Appendix C is not the answer [hixie.ch].

    • I'd say Nvu is today where Dreamweaver was maybe four years ago, sans the nasty Dreamweaver bug that would once in a while replace all your relative links with absolute local paths.

      For what I do it would be insane to spend 400 bucks on a copy of Dreamweaver. You can manage a nice looking business site with Nvu, if you're working with largely static content. The style sheet editor could use some work, but give them time.

      Linspire is backing Nvu development and they seem to be making excellent progress.

  • What about XSLT? (Score:2, Interesting)

    by hsoft ( 742011 )
    XSLT is the most obvious and powerful way to make templating for webpages.

    • Actually, Apache Cocoon [apache.org] provides a framework based on XSLT that allows pregeneration of pages. I might be wrong, I never used it, but that's what it looks like.

    • I just use a 60 line homebrewed XML pipelining app for my web templates.

  • Faced the same problem - wrote my own CMS (Score:3, Interesting)

    by kafooey ( 577375 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @06:22PM (#11299717) Homepage

    I faced the same problem with friends and professional clients - a mixture of common problems left them mith a real mess, and wary of consultants and designers.

    I ended up writing my own Content Management System [pluggedout.com], and am now trying to slow things down...

    I haven't even finished writing it and the company I work for (a systems integrator) want to license it for commercial use for several big projects. I have agreed with them to let me keep it open source and free for non commercial use - so you can find out about it on the PluggedOut [pluggedout.com] webspace where I give all kinds of code away.

    Actually - the CMS project has been a real eye opener to the problems of getting corporates to understand open source... another story for another time :)

  • A great replacement for Dreamweaver (Score:4, Interesting)

    by jd142 ( 129673 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @06:28PM (#11299769) Homepage
    I've moved most of our site over to a database backend with users able to edit the page from within IE using the SPAW web editor from Solmetra. http://www.solmetra.com/en/disp.php/en_products/en _spaw/en_spaw_about [solmetra.com].

    Yes, I know, IE, but remember that's what most people use. They're working on a gecko version currently, but it's still in beta. The current version works fine in firefox now except that you don't get wysiwyg editing, just html.

    The way it works is this:

    We have a web page layout designed by a graphic artist. The content part of the page is stored in a database. The user logs into to the system and as the user surfs the site, any web page that the user can edit has a button at the bottom saying "edit this page". Permissions are done through a mysql database. Spaw doesn't care how you do security, they just provide the editor. When the user presses edit, the page is reloaded, but this time the content is loaded in the spaw editor embedded in the browser. User edits page, presses button to publish and the data is pumped back into the database and published instantly.

    I *really* like this system. I can customize the menus and create my own styles for the style menu. I put the official company colors as a style on an external style sheet and then add it to the menu. People that want to hightlight text can then use the official company colors. If the colors change, I just edit one style sheet.

    It really has worked well for us. No more licensing or software install hassles. Need to work from home? If you've got IE 5.5 or higher, and soon the gecko engine, you're set.

    While it isn't quite the same as Dreamweaver templates, the result is similar. Users can only edit the parts of the page that we give them permission to edit. We don't have to worry about a user deciding not to go with the approved layout and template.

    I really can't say enough good things about the SPAW product.

  • SMARTY (Score:2, Informative)

    by cozinator2 ( 808369 )
    I'm surprised nobody's mentioned Smarty. It seems to be gaining popularity as a useful system for separating content from presentation. http://smarty.php.net/ [php.net]

  • SMARTY - God's gift to PHP programmers. (Score:4, Informative)

    by TheLittleJetson ( 669035 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @06:37PM (#11299852)
    I've done a few projects using Smarty [php.net]. It's pretty nifty, keeps all your markup separate from your code... It has some simple flow control stuff in it that makes the code nice and clean too.

    Recently, I've been using this to serve up XUL [xulplanet.com] and it works remarkably well.
  • The high price is only for the current version of Dreamweaver. If you go to PriceWatch [pricewatch.com] or PriceGrabber [pricegrabber.com] you can find older versions (I bought version 3.0 for around $60.00) for far less than the $400.00 price quoted in the article.

  • The real problem with open source (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Anonymous Coward on Saturday January 08, 2005 @06:51PM (#11299955)
    Isn't the lack of any particular program, its a lack of innovation and an inability to think outside of the box and produce new ideas for applications that provide a true advantage. I mean, 15 years ago probably if people were trying to get some hypothetical open source Unix system onto business desktop systems, probably everybody would have assumed that a big drawback was the lack of a top-rate text-based spreadsheet to compete with Lotus 1-2-3. And a bunch of competing projects would start up, and maybe a few years down the road you would have two or three almost-complete 1-2-3 alternatives for our OS. But would that make businesses switch? No, because in the mean time the commercial software industry would have moved on to the more advanced graphical paradigm as exemplified by Excel, and we'd still be behind. If all you do is copy existing commercial software, you'll ALWAYS be behind.
    • It took far more than "two or three years" to switch from CP/M and Lotus to Windows and Excel. And there were earlier mini-computers too, like PDP-11. So we are talking about 10-20 years here. Many programs can be born, used and retired within this time frame.

      And besides, there is nothing wrong with reimplementing of commercial software. We have OpenOffice, and who is hurt by that? Nobody, MS included; but now you have more choices.

      Businesses take risks and invest into development of new stuff. In ret

  • Use it for WYSIWYG tables! (Score:3, Insightful)

    by PeeAitchPee ( 712652 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @06:58PM (#11300009)

    I maintain a fairly large PHP / CSS-based site. I use Dreamweaver MX 2004, and it's always get the code tab open -- except when I'm dealing with tables. Yeah, of course I know how to hand-code tables, but man, to be able to graphically split and combine cells, and completely reformat tables -- where by hand I'd have to edit each cell / row manually -- is a huge timesaver.

    I also like PHP's Site Maintenance features and have found it to be flexible enough to handle a variety of different testing environments (local over the network, FTP, etc.). And finally, its site-wide search and replace capabilities are excellent.

    Could I get away with a freeware editor and some sort or grep-type functionality? Sure . . . but in general Dreamweaver is a really solid tool specifically geared towards web development, and like someone already mentioned, nothing else comes close. The only problems are its steep price tag and mediocre CSS capabilities.

  • Dreamweaver + PHP Incldues (Score:3, Interesting)

    by gellenburg ( 61212 ) <george@ellenburg.org> on Saturday January 08, 2005 @07:26PM (#11300205) Homepage Journal
    I use Dreamweaver. Extensively. Over 70 different sites are stored within Dreamweaver.

    I also use PHP Includes. Extensively. Over half of my sites are PHP Include -based as far as templates are concerned.

    One of the things that Dreamweaver MX 2004 blows everything else out of the water is the ability to *internally* understand PHP Includes, and render the contents in the edit window.

    The only time things get dicy is when I need to edit any of the "common/layout-*.inc" files since they're partial HTML so Dreamweaver *does* have a little hard time dealing with those, but most of those edits are maintained in the Code view window anyway so it's not a big deal.

    For any serious web developer, Dreamweaver is so much more than its templates, and is almost a must to have in one's toolkit.

  • Is it so hard for OSS coders to just duplicate the feature in things like Bluefish and other web editors?

    I love open source as much as anyone else, but Dreamweaver really is the best-of-breed for web designers and developers who want to build good, standards-based sites. Its templating sustem is a boatload easier to use than ttree and Perl. I don't want to have to code, just so I can get coding!

    And you know what? If Macromedia came out with Dreamweaver for Linux, I'd buy and use it...at least until the

  • I know they'd never release anything open source, but just having a package like Dreamweaver available on Linux would be great for giving the platform credibility, and at the same time prove there was a market for Linux software.

    It would make a lot of sense too: Linux is predominantly used to *serve* pages, why not have it *create* them too.

    I thought Macromedia were considering the idea of porting a few of their products to Linux. Or at the very least, getting them working happily with WINE.

    What happen

  • Obligatory WebMacro plug (Score:3, Informative)

    by MCRocker ( 461060 ) on Saturday January 08, 2005 @07:56PM (#11300388) Homepage
    Well, maybe I don't understand what it is that is so special about Dream Weaver's templating engine, but it sure doesn't sound like anything too special. It would be fairly easy to do the same thing with WebMacro [webmacro.org] (site down at the moment), or it's spinoff Velocity [apache.org]. Although both are intended as "Templating Engines" that run on the server, it's easy enough to set them up to generate static content the way that the article describes. Similarly, more extensive content management systems like Apache Forrest [apache.org], which is based on Cocoon [apache.org] are available. I don't see what the big deal is.
    • I've seen what the tigris guy's are doing with scarab issue tracking system via velocity templates and I'm very impressed. The recursive development with velocity is much faster than JSP's and allows for very complete scripting.

      I currently am maintaining and building onto a TCL based templating engine that is albeit limited in some ways but still rock solid and fully extensible.

      If full JS support is available for your users, you could always dump the server side templating model and switch to a server dum
  • Firstly Dreamweaver's templating can hardly be described as powerful, its a pretty obvious and standard tool, and any web design application that doesn't have something like this is useless in any real world application. Obviously css is the standard to use for most continuity and all you have left is things like copyright notices and menus. PHP can handle the job easily but if you're not up to that then I have no idea, Nvu doesnt seem to do it, what can I say, that sucks.
  • Open Office draw is a reasonable program to use for layout of fliers etc. It also works pretty good for creating mock-ups of what you want a website to look like. If there was a 'save as html' feature it would be the perfect html editing tool.
  • Dreamweaver is an impressive behemoth of a tool, no doubt whatsoever. Back in 1999/2000 it was the only possible way to edit and manage websites on a professional level. Dreamweavers wysiwyg power with the older browsers and it's HTML editing features are unmatched. The template engine completely abstracts changes to a website in your developement directory and automatically keeps track of anything you what across multiple documents. If DW doesn't crash and screw up your template dir that is - which does happen more often than you like. It's the best thing you can use ... ...if you don't have a CMS.
    Which gets me right to the point:
    Sorry, but it's like five years since the early dot-bomb days where dynamic server side stuff was considered exotic and people got payed for klicking static websites together. You may haven't noticed, but the world has moved on. There [typo3.org] are [mamboserver.com] something [plone.org] like [slashcode.org] fifteen [callistocms.com] bazillion [phpnuke.org] open [midgard-project.org] source [e107.org] content [bricolage.cc] management [xaraya.com] systems [openacs.org] out [phpcms.de] there [nuxeo.org]. One better than the next.
    Who the fuck needs DW nowadays? You don't want DW! DWs concepts are ancient by todays standards. The last time I used it was about 4 years ago in some project where the system team couldn't get their stuff together and set up a halfway decent JSP framework and we had to hack the webdocs by hand in record time. And my web productivity has tripled by now, since I exclusively use content management systems (as every body else does), and be it "only" to generate the html docs offline and publish the output to static webspace.

    Honestly now: Ditch DW allready, it's nothing but a huge waste of time these days. Trust me, I make a living with this stuff. And take a look at one of the frameworks above. To save your time, I recommend checking out one of the following: Plone/Zope, Callisto CMS, Mambo, Typo3, Mason, Slashcode, or (forgot this one above) Xoops [xoops.org]. Save yourself half to three quarters of webdev time in the long run.
    Oh, and welcome to 2005. ;-)

  • XML+XSL? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by POds ( 241854 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @12:17AM (#11301789) Homepage Journal
    I'm not sure about dream weavers templating mechanism. I've used Dreamweaver 4 in commercial developing, but not totaly indepth. I wonder if templating can be accomplished by simple xml+xsl and sabcmd (Salbatron XSL processor) or any other XSL processors?

  • Makefiles are my solution (Score:3, Interesting)

    by McDutchie ( 151611 ) on Sunday January 09, 2005 @01:23AM (#11302073) Homepage
    Not being averse to editing a site by hand and not being entirely a stranger to programming either, I've taken to simply using Makefiles (with GNU `make') to implement site templates. Works like a charm. `make' resolves the dependencies and automatic updates, and the Makefile calls `cat' for concatenating and `sed' for inserting, replacing and editing. Mine even automatically updates the stuff to the webserver and makes backups.

    If you're not familiar with these tools, the learning curve may be somewhat steep, but it's a very powerful method.

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