Dreamweaver

**DJ Ms. White** · 01-19-13, 03:16 PM

Currently, the radio station uses Dreamweaver to write/maintain the website. I've heard that Dreamweaver is shit (Bunni); if it is, how could I convince them to use something else? I should say that other than myself, there is only one other person with coding experience at the station; he is graduating at the end of the year.

**Rumble** · 01-19-13, 03:51 PM

Dreamweaver is awesome. Experts and newbies can tailor it to work best for their skill level. I wouldn't change.

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**AetheLove** · 01-19-13, 04:30 PM

Originally Posted by DJ Mr. White

Currently, the radio station uses Dreamweaver to write/maintain the website. I've heard that Dreamweaver is shit (Bunni); if it is, how could I convince them to use something else? I should say that other than myself, there is only one other person with coding experience at the station; he is graduating at the end of the year.

Not sure who "them" is.

If "them" are people who don't actually do the work but have somehow reserved for themselves the authority to bless or banish software, then (in my experience) you convince "them" to bless something else by having the people who do the actual work just start using something else. Then, in six months, someone casually mentions the name of the software in a meeting. The priests will say "oh, what's that?", and you say, "uh... it's what we've been using to update the site for the last 8 months." At that point, it's a fait accompli.

It's important that the work really has been getting done with whatever new software you want.

If "them" are some other faction of people working on the site (one other guy?), then your job is both simpler and potentially more difficult: you have to convince them that their life will be better.

... not that the site will be better, or that money will be saved, or that you'll be happier - that THEY will be {richer, happier, healthier, wealthier, get laid more}

Though it was never my choice, and I often found it annoying, I always thought Dreamweaver was a decent tool for people who liked to work that way. I occasionally trained people how to use it. I haven't looked at it in years. It always sucked a little. Maybe it sucks more now.

Either way, if you want to make the argument against Dreamweaver and for something else, then you need to be personally acquainted with (a) why Dreamweaver isn't good for your purposes and (b) why Product X is better. "Cuz Bunni said so" won't work well as a reason.

Also (and again, I haven't used it in years), though Dreamweaver output plenty of brain-dead HTML and overly verbose javascript, in the end it never prevented other people from editing the files with whatever tool they liked. If you want to edit .css files with something else, then just go ahead and do it. Your web server doesn't give a damn what anyone uses to create/edit files.

Cheers,

AetheLove

**DJ Ms. White** · 01-19-13, 04:43 PM

I honestly didn't like it since it looked like it wrote bloated code. I like clean code.

As for who "them" are, there's the other guy who knows how to code who generally gets backing from the rest of the higher ups. I've tried to convince him to use VS in the past (especially since Devsense released the PHP tools for VS 2012); his complaint was that he (and the station) would have to pay for that. That was the end of that; I threw up a wtf seeing as the station had to pay for Dreamweaver. He's also the guy who has done questionable wiring in the past that made myself and a coworker throw up an additional wtf (e.g. switch to a poll 3yds away on the right back to a poll right by the switch repeated a few times and then finally to the target computer that was 1 foot from the switch.

**Kanati** · 01-19-13, 05:09 PM

Dream weaver is AWESOME

**DJ Ms. White** · 01-19-13, 05:21 PM

Oh boy. Kanati must be high or something. Badumtish.

**a weakling spaz** · 01-19-13, 06:49 PM

Meh. Dreamweaver can be pretty handy and save a lot of time, once you learn how to use it. The code isn't "clean" but it sure ain't the garbage some of the other WYSIWYG editors crank out. I wasted a lot of time writing HTML in a text editor. Yeah, it was clean, but it sure was a pain in the ass and tedious.

**Bunni** · 01-20-13, 02:47 PM

You're taking me out of context home'z. Dreamweaver is ok. It all depends on the user's skill level, personal preference, what you are building.

In general, a problem with a lot of the html wysiwyg editors that are not in-browser, is that they are more "what you see is ... close...ish, to what you will get" and that varying range can cause headaches when supporting multiple browsers; this is my biggest qualm. See i can use notepad++ or zend studios to edit the code then preview it in the actual browser which will have more powerful LIVE editing tools than dreamweaver can ever hope to achieve and given that I've never found the wysiwyg aspect of dreamweaver to ever be useful... so why use it?

Both chrome and firefox's (firebug) in browser editors are insanely powerful, you can edit anything about the page without refreshing so you are cutting out the middle man (because i guarantee if you trailer your site to what you see in an enclosed, mimic wysiwyg ide like dreamweaver, you're gonna' have a bad time).

My problems with dreamweaver lie in that the ide tries to control everything and IMO in doing so overcomplicates a lot of otherwise very simple things. For example, say i've got an existing site, I'm editing a page and want to add a new css rule. I can use the little tool window for adding a new rule, but I have to use their tool to navigate to find the file i want to append the rule to, or use their incontext rule appendation thing. Which, admittedly, is kind of cool, it does auto set the correct namespace for a rule but damn do i hate DW's css property editor... It takes me forever to find what I am looking for then i usually have to fiddle with DW to set the field to what I want (e.g. set margin on only certain side), or hell if you're trying to set a field to a value that dreamweaver does not have in its combo drop downs. W/e takes waaaaaay too fucking long when all i need to do is open the css file type 3 lines and a couple of words and save... This is what i do most of the time anyways: type lines of code into a file, all the gui crap of dreamweaver puts a serious crimp into my efficiency.

But again it all depends on your preference, skill level, and what you are building Everything I do is low level, I'm not a cosmetic's guy. If we make building an actual building analogous to a website, i'm the constructor who comes in and builds everything from ground up and paint the walls a default beige or w/e the plans specify from the designers, letting the designers come in and fiddle with decorations, wall color, furniture lighting hardware, w/e. A designer type might find dreamweaver a lot more useful than i do.

Dreamweaver has a lot more tools for visual stuff than it does features for programming frameworks or building sites from frameworks (AND NOT JUST MAKING TWEAKS to an existing sites built on a frameworks): of which it has a serious lack of.

Hell you might even be able to simplify things and say that if you use your mouse alot you might like dreamweaver, but if you find having to switch from two hands on the keyboard to using the mouse as annoying than you might hate dreamweaver...