Dreamweaver MX Complete package

...myself with the purchase of Dreamweaver MX – the successor to Dreamweaver 4, a product which I had used since its launch in late 2000, having grown-up with Dreamweaver – I remember using Dreamweaver 1.2 at the company I worked for in Brussels way way back… The entire MX range is effectively version six, with the Flash player being called Flash 6 player (it is a plug-in rather than a fully fledged software package).

Following hot on ...
...is not the case with Dreamweaver MX, which has a new look (something tells me that the on-going legal rumblings with Adobe might have necessitated that to a certain degree) and a lot of new features. Previously there had been Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver Ultradev, with the latter containing the functions that were used to create web applications, although it has now been including in Dreamweaver MX so effectively you get DW and DW Ultradev for your ... more

Whilst my mother announced to me on the phone that she’d just gone and bought an MX-5, I had to content myself with the purchase of Dreamweaver MX – the successor to Dreamweaver 4, a product which I had used since its launch in late 2000, having grown-up with Dreamweaver – I remember using Dreamweaver 1.2 at the company I worked for in Brussels way way back… The entire MX range is effectively version six, with the Flash player being called Flash 6 player (it is a plug-in rather than a fully fledged software package).

Following hot on the heels of Macromedia’s Flash MX release, which marked the start of the whole new MX concept from Macromedia (to all intents and purposes it sounds suspiciously like their answer to XP – although admittedly they are not going to be launching an Office package or an Operating System!

I always view new versions of software with an air of suspicion, as I know that certain developers release new editions more often than others release bug fixes and patches (and the new versions are really little more than that in actual fact…). However that is not the case with Dreamweaver MX, which has a new look (something tells me that the on-going legal rumblings with Adobe might have necessitated that to a certain degree) and a lot of new features. Previously there had been Dreamweaver and Dreamweaver Ultradev, with the latter containing the functions that were used to create web applications, although it has now been including in Dreamweaver MX so effectively you get DW and DW Ultradev for your money, and there is an increasing likelihood that Homesite, another Macromedia product will also disappear from the Macromedia product palette. As a result Dreamweaver MX is the one for pro webdesigners – as it offers the full spectrum of web development possibilities, from hand-coding (yes, some developers still prefer to handcode!), through graphic design and various database connections.

With a tendency towards ASP.NET, PHP, Cold Fusion and JSP coding Dreamweaver MX now incorporates automatic generation of code in these respective languages, as well as continued support for DHTML (and they’ve included the various behaviours that are available in the current version 6 browsers – huzzah!), so that the results will work in all major browsers (that’s one headache I would hate to have if I were a pro webdesigner…). As ever Dreamweaver steals a march over Frontpage in that it does not use proprietary HTML tags (which ultimately do little more than slow down the loading times for the pages) and also doesn’t alter existing HTML that is parsed through it (Frontpage enjoys this little trick… grrrrr….!)

Having completed the installation process, which was as ever a simple and straightforward process, I fired up DW MX for the first time, although it was not quite like the feeling of ripping open my Christmas presents, as I had downloaded the beta version from Macromedia’s site to have a little look at before this one popped through the letterbox. As I had previously mentioned, the product had a new look – with the traditional floating palettes, which did tend to clutter the screen up a lot and infuriated by the fact that they were not dockable with one another, having been replaced by the integrated palettes, with everything selectable from the right hand side and beneath the work area, where the properties palette is kept.

These palettes can be maximised and minimised as necessary, which I would have to recommend as there is a tendency for them to take up a large amount of the screen area, which means that if you are wanting to design a site that is optically optimized for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 then you would be well advised to have your screen resolution set to 1280 x 1024 pixels resolution otherwise you’ll find yourself having to scroll around a lot. Macromedia have also left in the “classic” look of previous incarnations to help those who preferred the old layout, although I headed over to the new layout straight away.

I had mentioned earlier that I wondered if HomeSite was going to be continued, and I suppose I ought to elucidate further as to what had caused me to doubt whether it would. In Dreamweaver MX’s coding view (now replete with line numbers – very useful if you use a browser to preview it and need to do a spot of debugging – unless like me your sites come out as they should first time out ;o) ) and the coder’s view is distinctly similar to that which users of homesite would remember (e.g. file explorer on the left-hand-side etc.). Other Homesite features to have been incorporated are snippets, colouring of syntax, code formatting and tag editing.

As with previous versions there are a host of extensions available for DW6 – which can be downloaded and managed using the in-built extension manager, with many existing add-ins being forward compatible – or MX being backward compatibility depending on how you look at it!

So what else is new???

Whilst Dreamweaver will never go as far as providing you with pre-designed websites from templates à la Frontpage, it has introduced a new feature whereby you can create pages based on pre-defined page layouts, although rather than offering a complete graphical page, they offer the basic elements you need, although they have fortunately steered clear of the Frontpage navigation systems.

Despite having said that Dreamweaver is good in that it doesn’t insert its own HTML like Frontpage does, that doesn’t mean that it is still compliant to W3C standards, and until now there has not been an in-built validator with Dreamweaver, although there is now. To use the validator, use the edit menu click on preferences and then click on validator and choose what you want to valid it with. Accordingly it is now possible to enforce ALT tags and document types appear in the header – an important part of compliance, although it is still possible to not stick pages through the validator.

Dreamweaver 4 could clean up HTML, especially of the Word and Frontpage flavours, making it possible to streamline nested font tags (I tended to avoid formatting the fonts until the page was complete, and then had a command (formed using the history) that would set the entire page to a particular font (usually Arial) – something that can also be done easily in MX using the history pane and selecting what commands you want included – very useful if you use server side includes a lot for server parsed HTML (e.g. as is the case on Cricinfo – one of the sites I manage is at www.austria.cricket.org and contains an example of shtml with SSI headers and footers). Dreamweaver MX has improved support with the hitherto unsupported (apart from thanks to a third party developer who wrote the command to do that) Word 2002 (from Office XP) and Frontpage 2002 (ditto) being supported – just wait for Microsoft to release a new issue of either to bugger it all up again.

For another use of the commands menus, I know that a lot of people also publish their Ciao and Dooyoo ops on their own sites – just in case both of Ciao and Dooyoo go tits up and so that people can still read their pearls of consumer wisdom. You could use the commands menu to tidy up the formatting (e.g. apply justification, change the font) and add a footnote e.g. "this op originally was written for uk.ciao.com or dooyoo.co.uk ..." (you get the idea!) with your little copyright message!

Of course no review is complete without an analysis of whether the purchase represents money well spent. I would have to say that nice though the software is to have, I can’t imagine too many home users having the money to splash out on this one – if you want to get a copy of an earlier edition, keep your eyes peeled for copies going begging on a magazine cover disk. Alternatively there are unreliable warez products – although who knows what nasty payloads they might also contain and of course the support is non-existent for pirate copies.

I paid €527.24 for my copy (German) from an online store here in Austria (approx £330) which was a tiny bit cheaper than the prices I have seen for the UK and including P&P. At the moment it is £351.02 from dabs.com, although if you want to go the whole MX hog – I will eventually I expect you can get it as part of the Studio MX Collection (Flash, Freehand, Fireworks and Dreamweaver MX versions) for £692.07 incl. VAT. Of course the other products in the range compliment Dreamweaver MX, and by having only purchased Dreamweaver MX to date I have not unlocked the full potential of MX – but hopefully will do soon, with Fireworks MX and Flash MX being part of an armoury for any webdesigner. 

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