Dreamweaver MX Upgrade from Dreamweaver 3 or 4
by Macromedia

List Price: $199.99
Category: Software
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Software Summary

Software Reviews of Dreamweaver MX Upgrade from Dreamweaver 3 or 4

Customer Review: Much better than I expected it to be!
Summary: 5 Stars

Indeed, Dreamweaver MX handles my CSS-styled pages with aplomb. But to my delight, it adds many features which I have found invaluable, such as "Snippets" (a library of code fragments you can insert anywhere), the ability to "cloak" folders so that they are not included when synchronizing to the server (invaluable for log and statistics folders on the server), the FTP log, a much improved style sheet editor, a nicer and more configurable workspace, and much, much more.

Dreamweaver MX is a delight to use and has made development and maintenance of my web sites even easier than in previous versions. If you have an earlier version of Dreamweaver, MX is definitely worth the upgrade. (And if you don't have Dreamweaver, you're missing out on what I think is the world's best web site design and maintenance product.)

Description of Dreamweaver MX Upgrade from Dreamweaver 3 or 4

This is a visual editor, which means you can create and edit a Web page by selecting items such as tables, forms, and images from a tabbed palette. The Properties panel lets you specify details such as borders, styles, and hyperlinks, and you can also use the visual editor for frames and layers. Many designers also like to edit the underlying HTML, and this is where Dreamweaver MX comes into its own. It supports either a pure code view or a split view that lets you click seamlessly between the code and visual editors. A lot of the features previously found in HomeSite, Macromedia's text-based Web editor, are now integrated into Dreamweaver, including pop-up code hints, a snippets panel that lets you keep handy pieces of code for reuse, and a tag chooser that lets you grab the right tag from a list. An O'Reilly tag reference is built in.

Dreamweaver's template support deserves special mention. Templates give you a quick start with a number of predesigned pages. In Dreamweaver MX, they can also be used to lock down areas of the page, so that contributors can create and edit a story without disturbing the design. Templates can be nested so that changes to an underlying template ripple through the pages that use it for powerful site-wide updates.

Macromedia used to market a product called Dreamweaver UltraDev, which allowed for rapid development of Web applications featuring online databases, member login, and other server-side elements. In Dreamweaver MX, this capability is built in. It has also been extended, adding support for ASP.NET and PHP as well as ColdFusion, JavaServer pages, and traditional ASP. Nonspecialists will find themselves able to build rich dynamic pages, while the integrated code editor makes this a capable development product as well. In fact, Dreamweaver MX has also replaced ColdFusion Studio as the primary development tool for ColdFusion MX. It is a uniquely flexible package.

Overall, it's hard to find fault with Dreamweaver MX. It's true that its complexity and professional features make it harder to pick up than some rival products. The abundance of panels and options can be confusing, and a high-resolution screen is required. In addition, the Studio MX products, which include Dreamweaver, are a better value for those who need more than one of the MX series. However, this takes nothing away from the excellence of Dreamweaver as the first-choice tool for professionals. --Tim Anderson

The new integrated workspace shared with Macromedia Flash MX and Fireworks MX includes tabbed document windows, dockable panel groups, customizable toolbars, and integrated file browsing. Prebuilt layouts and code, including site structures, forms, accessible templates, and JavaScript functions for interactivity, allow you to get started fast. A site setup wizard helps configure site information instantly for managing dynamic sites, staged sites, or sites hosted by ISPs.

Write code faster than ever before using features like code hints, tag editors, extensible color coding, tag choosers, snippets, and code validation. Accelerate development with support for XML, including creating, editing, validating XML code, and importing XML schemas. Easily introspect XML Web services. Ensure standards compliance with default creation of XHTML output, easy conversion from standard HTML to XHTML, and increased support for CSS2.

Note: This is an upgrade version for owners of Dreamweaver, Dreamweaver UltraDev, ColdFusion Studio 4.5 or later, or JRun Studio.

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