Comments on: Dreamweaver CS4: A Powerful Tool for an Imperfect World

By: conticreative

conticreative — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 20:53:18 +0000

This is a post for David and anyone having issues with DW recognizing files other than the default ones.

I encountered the same issue with Magento’s PHTML files. They are PHP files but DW would refuse to treat them as such. That meant no code didn’t work.

Luckily, I found a Tutorial on the Magento website on how to add phtml files to DW and make it recognize them as full php files. It’s not as simple as adding PHTML (or CTP) to the files extensions in the configuration.

Basically there are 3 (If I recall correctly) files that need to be updated.
Follow this link and use it as a blueprint for your purposes:

http://www.magentocommerce.com/wiki/general/opening_phtml_files_in_dreamweaver

By: david

david — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 09:06:13 +0000

to add to my last comment, dreamweaver cs4 has a much better css editor this time around. MUCH BETTER!

By: david

david — Sat, 31 Jan 2009 09:04:00 +0000

i use dreamweaver for the cakephp framework, and the most annoying thing is that i can’t tell dreamweaver cs4 that ctp files are php code. so syntax highlighting don’t come out of the box for cakephp. this will be the same for any framework that doesn’t use php or html as extensions. unfortunately for me, i have both a php and a ctp file for my front end design. i grew up on dreamweaver and c++ programming, and the fact that i can see the dumbed down version of my code and click on the design view to fastforward to code made it a major advantage for me.

unfortunately webdesign/development is not about about creating generic php, html, js, ect files any more. It’s not so simple. If adobe would just add a simple way to associate specific file types to be viewed as generic code types, then it would be a very good tool. I’ve had to hack my dreamweaver to highlight my ctp files with correct code highlighting.

unrelated to cs4, i would recommend adobe web cs4. all the other apps work very well for web dev, and flash especially. I was able to use papervision 3d flawlessly with the new flash.

By: duwei

duwei — Wed, 14 Jan 2009 04:05:23 +0000

1. Low cost high quality.
2. Best Adobe Flex outsourcing service provider.
3. More than 60 full time in-house Flex developers.
4. Our company Busycode Inc. was registered in San Francisco, Beijing and Nanning.
5. Our skill set is “Adobe Flex/AIR/Flash + .NET/Java/PHP + SQL Database”.
6. Our keywords are Flex developer, Flex coder, Flex programmer, Flex expert, Flex engineer, Flex specialist and Flex outsourcing service provider.
7. Please visit http://busycode.com or http://www.flexdeveloper.com.cn

By: halil

halil — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:44:55 +0000

Hi,

My only reason for not using DW is server-side code. And speed, sometimes, especially if I am going to edit a little bit (I use Notepad++ for simple editing). DW is open on my taskbar for most of the work, including PHP, but if I have lots of server-side things to do, I see that a powerful server-side IDE can save me a lot of time, and switch to that IDE (namely Zend Studio for Eclipse :))

Well, I hope it’s not a problem to mention a rival name directly, but I must express that my dream tool would be a marriage of DW (for obvious reasons), ZS (obvious, again) and Notepad++ (for Unicode and newline viewing/conversion utilities, lightweightness and some other things.)

PS : I am too in the league of developers who are yet to find a tool/IDE that match DW’s S&R superiority :) How the hack did you make something like this?!

By: Anonymous

Anonymous — Thu, 18 Dec 2008 17:41:04 +0000

Hi,

PS : I am too in the league of developers who are yet to find a tool/IDE that match DW’s S&R superiority :) How the hack did you make something like this?!

By: zoonunit

zoonunit — Thu, 11 Dec 2008 04:20:11 +0000

Don,

Thanks for dropping by. I develop in Drupal and Firebug has been an “almost” perfect add-on to Firefox. It can identify all the CSS, the line numbers and files. The only thing missing is the ability to WRITE changes back to those CSS files from within the Firebug interface. One workaround I use with Dreamweaver is to load the corresponding CSS files in DW, then note the line numbers from the CSS in Firebug, go straight to DW and make the changes, save, then refresh my browser.

Now that DW CS4 has live view, why can’t it identify the CSS files like Firebug and then allow developers to link to and save CSS changes?? Is it because the PHP server doesn’t serve up the actual file location to the browser? If that’s the reason, then why can’t DW get the file locations from the test server settings, using the developer’s FTP login and PW? Or perhaps we would need to map to the files within the server definition? (As with many developers, I develop on a local server such as xampp, so I have direct file access to the CSS files)

If I could just jump straight to CSS from live view in a PHP rendered app like Drupal, and then save that back to the original CSS file, that would be a TREMENDOUS productivity boost.

By: wheeler

wheeler — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 00:13:37 +0000

Don, I forgot to mention that I was talking specifically about php in relation to autocomplete, which tied into my second point about the current document not currently seeming to know about all the other included files. For autocomplete to completely work DW would have to read all the included files and understand what is available in the current scope.

I know that the inbuilt php functions autocomplete which is great, but if that was extended to variables I have previously declared and functions/methods, it would be truly awesome.

By: Don at Adobe

Don at Adobe — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 12:41:37 +0000

Conticreative, I think Find and Replace might be one of my favorite features in the product, esp the stuff you can do with Specific Tag.
But honestly, every time I invoke F&R, I am a bit surprised when the little toolbar doesn’t appear at the bottom of the app, a la Firefox.
We do get requests for enhancing F&R and search in particular. I can add your vote to the list.

Wheeler, we added dynamic Javascript code hinting to CS4. Attach a js file and when you are typing in a block, you should get function/object/method hinting.
And if your js syntax is incorrect, we will flag it…

Thanks for the discussion!
Don@Adobe

By: wheeler

wheeler — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 06:42:02 +0000

Before DW embraces any specific development frameworks, it first needs to assist the developer with some very important things:

- code autocomplete – HTML and CSS autocomplete is awesome – if that could be replicated with variable and function autocomplete it would make a massive difference

- I think the second problem is more complex, but is directly related to autocompleting code – that is for the current document to understand the structure of the application. DW should read other included files and detect when you are doing something that won’t work, like using a function that is not declared.

- and if you really want to impress us, syntax validation