home > articles >

Adobe Dreamweaver 8 Features  May 15, 2007

Have you ever struggled with CSS? Have you ever run out of time and failed to meet your project deadline? Have you ever needed one tool to do all your web development? Have you ever wanted to click a button and have repetitive code tasks repeated? Building your web sites is more productive and simple with Adobe Dreamweaver because of thefollowing key features: intuitive site management features, tab based insert bar, and CSS panel.

The site management features in Adobe Dreamweaver are excellent. For example, let us say you have 15 different web sites to manage at your company. With the site management feature built into Adobe Dreamweaver you can set each one of these sites up with a development version and upload to stage or production version. This can be done either through FTP or over the network. For each site you can give it a unique name and they will all appear in the Files panel in a drop down menu. You have just read how effective the site management features are in Adobe Dreamweaver; let us take a look at the insert bar feature.

You can use the tab based insert bar to automate repetitive coding tasks. For example, how many times have you typed the code to do an include in a ColdFusion project. With the insert bar feature built into Adobe Dreamweaver, the task is only a click of a button away and then you select your file. The insert bar feature for Adobe Dreamweaver has many common ColdFusion tasks that will come up during the development process, such as, outputting data, URL re-location, and setting up parameters for variables, adding pound signs around variables, and commenting your code. Another example would be when using the insert bar; you have access to other code snippets for regular XHTML development. You will find this feature in Adobe Dreamweaver will make you more productive while keeping things simple.

The new features that Adobe Dreamweaver has added for CSS support are great. If you go to the window menu and select css styles a panel window will open up. When you click on the plus sign in the bottom right corner, you either can create a new css class rule for an html tag, class, or advanced custom ID. Once you press ok, you will be taken to the most valuable piece of the CSS puzzle. This CSS rule window will actually teach you and help you to understand how CSS works. After you have done this repeatedly for the rules you have made you will start to see the benefits of this method. It teaches you what options, attributes are available, and what are the possible values. This is an excellent feature in Adobe Dreamweaver and makes CSS design for your ColdFusion web sites easy.

In closing, you have learned some important features about how Adobe Dreamweaver is effective for building your web sites. You will see the difference in the productivity resulting in rapid development. There are hundreds of other helpful features in Adobe Dreamweaver that you will need to explore. Adobe Dreamweaver has been around for quite sometime and each new version is an incremental improvement over the last. Building your ColdFusion web sites is more productive and simple with Adobe Dreamweaver because of the following key features: intuitive site management features, tab based insert bar, and the CSS panel.