As Simon say horses for courses.

Add in a user with knowledge of XHTML, CSS and either notepad, Visual Studio, Coffe Cup HTML or Dreamweaver and you can reach something incredible, and that’s before you get started on moo tools!

This article seems to be arguing that web 2 can be made incredible without skill. I would say it can be made run of the mill only, until you pep it all up with skill.

But it’s so not all about Dreambeaver either. Dreambeaver by it’s very nature leads to site where tables are used for formatting and separation of content, style and code is mucked together. Being able to do a nice looking site in Dreambeaver does not a web professional make. That doesn’t mean it’s not a great editor if you actually have a handle on the theory of web standards. It just means that being able to use InDesign doesn’t mean buying Dreambeaver makes you a web professional. Or anything even close to it!

Tom I think you should do a review on this… Aptana — http://aptana.com/

The editor is based on Eclipse the Java standard bearer, the cloud is based on Mozilla JavaScript, the system is integrated and studio is FREE.

Nothing wrong with Dreambeaver but XHTML should be learned and anyone who thinks they can use a WYSIWYG editor to write XHTML hasn’t got what it’s about. And those of us that do get it are using a CMS and/or Ruby on Rails. We have written enough code to know that leveraging the work of others is that way to go.

Drupal is great stuff. jQuery is up there with must learns. PHP skills are essential. Dare I say… “get with the program lads”.

In this regard (open versus proprietary) I’m agnostic-ish. I’m personally not technically savvy enough to understand the underlying open-source technologies and while I like the idea of Linux conquering the world (I even delivered a lecture to my design students back in ‘95 or ‘96, I think, in which I postulated that very scenario with regard the then nascient OS) I came to realise some time ago that digging around in archane open-source forums in the quest for answers to pressing practical problems was not an effective strategy for me. Clearly, it is a very effective and enjoyable strategy for some, but not for me yet, though I wish it well. Having said that, my browser of choice is Firefox and I also routinely use a number of open-source apps on a fairly regular basis.

I do like the idea of the one-stop-shop; I know where I stand. That’s as true of CMSs as it is of image processing apps. That’s probably why we’ve invested in EE and will likely settle upon it as our CMS of choice, rather than, say, Drupal or Wordpress.

I suspect that it is for this reason that until I can get Photoshop, Dreamweaver (yes, I still love it) Fireworks (my all time favourite app) and any of a number of other treasured proprietary apps on Linux then I’m unlikely to make the move away from Windows based systems. Not because I especially like Windows (or that I’m unreceptive to alternatives), but because 100% of my clients do.

Here’s a bit of crystal ball gazing – just for fun. In five years time the CMS of choice will be platform agnostic and will be Flash based. And it will be largely wysiwyg. And it will be proprietary.

I haven’t really looked at tables but some of the wysiwyg editors offer pretty extensive end user control while some of the text input filters are designed specifically for table handling. And with CCK and templates you have total control over how preset tables such as end user ratings are styled.

And of course all this can be enabled for free for all users with the necessary permissions, including site visitors where desirable, in the browser itself rather than to a closed workgroup who have to pay for the proprietary Contribute.

Quite. This is one aspect of the CMS I’ve tried (Drupal, very little; WordPress, a bit; EE, a good bit more) that seems a positive step backwards in time. Frankly, the idea that the content contributor should have to jump through hoops simply to add a bit of Flash content, image or video is derisory in this day and age. I’ve re-read your article (from the link above) and I can’t help but feel that you are attempting to pass off these inadequacies as benefits by suggesting that it may not be such a wise idea in allowing contributors to do such wild and wacky things with images, such as, say, have them floated left. Or resize them. Or crop them. As long as the client is aware of the correct way to apply styles within the constraints of the style guides I’m personally all for them getting on with it. And what’s wrong with that?

We’ve come across similar problems with trying to get tabular data into CMS managed sites and then providing the capability of styling it accordingly in a way that is simple and intuitive for the client. In Contribute, this is a doddle, one can apply CSS styles to whole tables, table headers and table individual table cells if necessary with a click or two. How is this handled in Drupal?

This aspect of online CMSs – that they only really handle content well as long as it’s in the form of words – is, I believe – the current glaring weakness when compared to ‘traditional’ alternatives such as, say, Contribute.

So far this year I have picked up two new main contractors (design agencies) both of whom have html/css skills but none of the above have any scripting/database skills and already this year looks like it will be a successful one.

You appear to be correct, the demand for non-static sites is really taking off, at least in my back room office anyway!

cheers,

Simon.

*I can’t believe that I fell for the, “If you teach our designer (free of charge) html/css then we can supply you with better thought out designs,” line!

Moreover in the future I would expect the cms, or other free apps, to take over these template and css duties and for the cms’s in-built design quality/choice and customisability to radically improve, again reducing the need for an expensive and complex tool like Dreamweaver.

I’m not attacking, or even criticizing, Dreamweaver but I am saying that its great strength ie standalone page-based static publishing (and ground-up development) can’t compete with the scalability and functionality of a modern community-oriented, community-created cms-based approach.

For my own web site I use Wordpress (not much on the site though!). And I use Dreamweaver to design/redesign the CSS/HTML. It’s just so easy and saves me lots of time.

A pretty straight forward way with Wordpress is view the template/page/whatever with a browser, copy the resultant source code and paste in into, say, test.html and then edit that in Dreamweaver. Easy. Same with my own CMS.

Yes, you have to get your hands a bit grubby with the PHP code in order to structure things properly (although, personally, I love messing with PHP) unless you settle for the default setup. Don’t know if you can do that with Drupal. Once again, Dreamweaver is a real time saver, you can spot coding problems really simply just because of the colour coding in the scripts.

When I have time I will revisit Drupal because it seems more suited to web sites than Wordpress which seems more ‘blog-centric’.

Meanwhile, do I qualify as maybe someone who does fall in the middle of this one? I really like CMSs and I really like it that I can use Dreamweaver on them (well not on Drupal …. yet!).

Horses, for courses, no point in getting all fundamentalist about these things ….

Simon.