Just a few days after the launch of the long-awaited Drupal 7.0 version, arch-rival Joomla launched its latest 1.6 release…

It’s interesting to note that, apart from some significant interface improvements, 1.6’s two main additions are specifically designed to meet Drupal head-on.

The Most Powerful CMS?

Firstly Joomla 1.6 integrates its previously separate Section and Category Managers to provide a more flexible system built on categories that can now be nested to any depth. Secondly it introduces a new Access Control system where you can create custom user groups and control what they can see via access levels, and what they can do via permission levels.

These are both major advances, but they still don’t go as far as Drupal’s core taxonomy handling and user role/permission systems. For example, you still can’t apply multiple categories with Joomla 1.6 nor get Drupal’s completely granular control over custom permissions. For deep power and granular control, Drupal wins.

Moreover, as Joomla digs deeper to graft on similar power, it actually ends up becoming more complicated than Drupal. To those who have tried Drupal that might sound near impossible but, if you don’t believe me, check out the later stages of the video below (The Art of Joomla’s video introduction to Joomla’s new Access Control).

Joomla 1.6 — Access Control from Captain Courageous on Vimeo.

The bottom line is that if category/term or access/permissions handling are crucial to what you want to achieve (especially for Web 2.0 sites where content is contributed by casual site visitors) then Drupal offers the more powerful and flexible implementation.

It’s also important to note that Joomla 1.6 doesn’t offer anything like Drupal 7.0’s biggest new attraction, its field-based handling of content in core (see my full Drupal 7.0 review).

Such granular control can take content management to an entirely new level, especially when allied with add-on field modules (for example, when handling embedded media or maps) and Drupal’s brilliant Views, a semi-core module that lets you build custom queries to pull out and display your field data.

The Best CMS?

Drupal 7.0 is certainly the more powerful CMS on paper, but it’s on the ground that counts

Drupal 7.0 remains the more powerful framework and indeed extends its lead. However that doesn’t mean that it’s the most powerful out of the box. In fact, out-of-the-box Drupal is pretty dreadful; it’s only when you’ve created your custom fields, content types, user roles and module mix that it comes into its own.

This ground-up building block approach is the secret of Drupal’s power but has two important downsides. To begin with, it goes a long way to explaining Drupal’s famously precipitous learning curve, which makes Joomla’s less-than-brilliant usability seem almost intuitive.

It also means that Drupal core is only half of the story. In fact it’s only when all the contributed modules that you want to use have been upgraded to be compliant with the 7.0 core – and with each other – that you’re ready to start building your site.

While Drupal 7.0 is certainly the more powerful CMS on paper, it’s on the ground that counts and here the comparatively self-contained Joomla scores highly. Joomla’s great strength is that it provides ready-to-go power that’s more than capable of producing the majority of websites.

Overall then, Drupal wins as the best, totally customisable framework for producing unique state-of-the-art Web 2.0 sites where content is contributed by site visitors, whereas Joomla victors as the best, largely customisable, off-the-shelf system for producing more traditional sites where content is contributed at organisation level by controlled workgroups.

And that still leaves plenty of room for WordPress as the best, partly customisable turnkey system for producing standard sites and blogs for individuals and small businesses (see my WordPress 3.0 review). Other systems, such as TYPO3, press the claims of their own particular mix of content management power and control.

Ultimately the best CMS depends entirely on you and what you want to do.

And the winner is…

That said, if a particularly odd person put a gun to my head and forced me to name the best CMS, there would be one clear winner. For basic photo enhancement Photoshop is complete overkill and most users are far better off with Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro, but we still all accept that Photoshop is the “best” photo editor.

On the same grounds, if you can master it, Drupal 7.0 is the best CMS.

Of the big three open-source content management systems (along with WordPress and Joomla), Drupal is generally recognised to be the most powerful and, as it’s been a full three years since the launch of 6.0, expectations are naturally high.

The good news is that the main focus of this latest release is on ease of use. There are a number of new features such as a menu and overlay-based approach to administration, a central dashboard and improved handling of the add-on modules that are the key to Drupal’s success, including the ability to install modules (and themes) directly by entering ftp URLs.

In terms of new power there’s a new default theme and theming improvements, and built-in image support including automatic resizing – but the big news is Drupal 7’s new integrated field-based handling. Essentially the longstanding CCK (Content Construction Kit) add-on module has been built into the core, enabling site builders to control just what content their contributors add and how. When combined with the brilliant Views add-on module, which lets you pull out and process field data and control how it is presented, Drupal 7.0 really does offer some pretty extraordinary content management power.

A full review will follow shortly, but in the meantime you can visit drupal.org for more information and a short promotional video. If you’re keen – and quick as it’s only free until 12 January – you can also visit drupalize.me for an hour-long in-depth video introduction to Drupal 7.0 hosted by Angela Byron (aka “webchick”) who, as lead maintainer, deserves much of the credit for this release.

Creating a business website requires specialist design skills and technical knowledge: neither of which are necessarily in the toolkit of the average business owner. And yet having a professional website is increasingly a matter of necessity rather than choice. Stir in a measure of financial restraint and the traditional choice of hiring a web design firm for a four-figure fee is simply not a viable option.

So what are we left with? PC Pro reader Grahame Berney got in touch regarding this very dilemma. As a designer himself, Grahame is constantly being asked by small businesses how they can have a professional web presence without breaking the bank.

Most small businesses opt for one of two approaches. The first is to ask whoever handles their letterhead and business card design to knock up a website. This can sometimes work but often results in an expensive website created by a non-specialist who then charges for each update. For the truly cash-strapped a trip to a PC retailer to pick up a copy of “Mr Site” or similar is often the order of the day. Sadly, I have yet to see a site created using a template-driven CD-ROM that could, however generously, be considered “professional”.

And so, in desperation, many small business owners look to the online site builder tools. I’m not sure they expect to end up with a professional website using these tools – by this point they’d settle for “acceptable”. Is it possible, then, to create a credible website using an online tool?

I’m evaluating the range of site builder tools to find out what can be achieved by a non-technical business owner. I had already reviewed the Getting British Business Online initiative with disappointing results. I’d also tested 1&1’s MyBusiness product which, so far, has proven to be the only service that produces acceptable results (you can read my review of 1&1 MyBusiness here). Next on the lists is Webs.com which claims to be powering 50 million sites.

On the plus side Webs.com is very simple to use, as you’d expect of a product aimed at non-techies. The free version provides a URL that’s a subdomain of webs.com – in this case I selected candle-making.webs.com. Once you’ve selected your site name, you choose a category for your site and browse the available templates. Oddly, the choice on offer doesn’t reflect the category so there’s no help in deciding what might be a good design for your business type.

Webs claims “300+ templates” but it seems to me that this includes all the colour variations so the true figure is a fraction of that. Once you’ve found a template you’re prepared to accept, you can then choose some pages to add. There’s not a lot of variety here and it doesn’t look as though it’s possible to have a completely custom structure for your site.

You can now use Webs’ SiteBuilder to add content. I didn’t find this particularly easy – it’s especially hard to edit pictures once they’ve been put in place. Although it looks superficially like a drag and drop interface, in use the editor is rather clunky. You can add functionality via “apps” which include blogs, calendars and FAQ pages as well as an Etsy Store (useful if you’re a craft retailer) or CafePress shop.

The free service is ad-supported and you have no control over which ad might appear. For a business, it’s essential that you have your own domain name and for this you need to subscribe to the Enhanced or Pro packages costing £66 and £158 per year respectively.

Overall, I’m unimpressed. I don’t believe it’s possible to create a professional business website using Webs.com and even if you were prepared to invest the considerable time necessary to achieve a reasonable result, Webs doesn’t offer any export function so you’d be stuck with them long after you’d outgrown the service.

So far, I’ve not found a service that would produce a website that’s even close to what you could expect from a skilled designer so that’s still the route I’d recommend in most cases. If the money simply isn’t there, or for off-line businesses for whom the website is little more than a business card, the only worthwhile service I’ve seen so far is 1&1’s MyBusiness. I’ll keep looking: suggestions welcome!

The beauty of WordPress.com is that it makes exploring what WordPress has to offer so painless. Essentially all you need is an email address and, within a couple of minutes, you can be creating your first posts and pages, changing your theme, monitoring your stats and so on. If you like what you see, you can either stick with WordPress.com’s default free hosting package, upgrade to get your own domain name ($15 a year), redirect an existing domain ($10 a year) or, most powerfully, switch to an independent WordPress host where you’ll be able to extend the framework’s capabilities via third-party plug-ins.

Generally the response has been amazingly enthusiastic – “the difference is night and day” – especially from those owners of existing sites who had previously been paying a fortune to traditional web designers whenever they’d needed to update existing pages.

Recently, however, for one correspondent the dream descended into a nightmare…

Having created a site on WordPress.com he decided it was so good he wanted to replace his existing site with it and sent out a mailshot to advertise the fact. Unfortunately as soon as he switched to his new primary domain (ie. example.com rather than example.wordpress.com) his email stopped working.

Domain mapping, email and custom DNS

Unfortunately things are not as simple as they seem. Indeed the WordPress.com support page includes this:

Warning: Changing the name servers will make any previously setup custom DNS records such as A, CNAME, or MX records stop working. To continue using them, you’ll need to enter new Custom DNS records once you have set up your domain on WordPress.com.

Unfortunately you need to know quite a bit about DNS to realise that this is a serious issue. In particular the Mail eXchanger MX record specifies a mail server responsible for accepting email messages.

At least this pointed to the solution, namely updating the MX record in WordPress.com as discussed on a Custom DNS support page. However, with pitiful support from WordPress.com and existing host alike, this proved easier said than done, as simply adding a pointer back to the original server didn’t solve the problem.

Moreover, based on the support page’s advice that, “it can take up to 48 hours for all the DNS changes to filter through the internet. Don’t panic if it doesn’t work right away”, my correspondent naturally panicked at the prospect of tweaking settings and then having to wait two days without email to see if they had worked.

Thankfully I was able to help him find a fix. On the same page where you enter your custom DNS records, WordPress.com has provided a link to Google Apps for Domains.  This is how WordPress.com provides email handling for those registering a domain with them and, by signing up, my correspondent was able to enter the code Google provided and then click the Generate DNS records command to automatically create the necessary custom MX code to get his domain name-based email back up and running almost instantly. In fact with Outlook-based desktop access as well as webmail access, plus the other benefits of Gmail handling, he was probably better off.

To be honest, I’m not sure how big an issue this is. With well over 10 million sites hosted on WordPress.com, the site must be one of the world’s biggest hosts and domain mapping targets, and clearly most redirects haven’t gone through the same nightmare. Certainly most hosting/domain providers should have experience of how to redirect web traffic to WordPress.com without messing up email. Quite possibly my correspondent’s setup was unusual in some way and I don’t know enough about DNS or email handling to say how (hopefully more experienced readers may be able to shed more light).

However the fact that it happened at all shows that it can be an issue and one that users should be aware of before mapping their existing domain. More importantly it shows that even the simplest content management system (CMS) can occasionally turn around and bite you – failing to backup your all-important database being the prime route from dream to nightmare for those who choose independent hosting.

I still strongly believe that the enormous benefits of CMS handling far outweigh its occasional pitfalls and that the best solution for those looking to create simple sites is WordPress, and that the easiest way to explore how WordPress works and what it can do is via WordPress.com. However I’ll now include a link to this post too.

The post obviously hit home, as I realised when the Adobe evangelist demonstrating Dreamweaver CS5 at the press launch began his talk by referring to it and, when he discovered that I was in the audience, suggested that I might want to “eat crow”.

Well I’m delighted to say that he was right… largely.

Before I explain why Dreamweaver CS5 is such an eye-opener, let me explain where I’m coming from. Basically, like the majority of web designers, I grew up with Dreamweaver learning the HTML and later CSS necessary to create the linked web pages that make up the traditional website.

However I now believe that this manual “static” page-based model has pretty much reached the end of its road. Firstly it just isn’t powerful enough as these days site visitors expect features such as in-built commenting, RSS feeds and so on. Most importantly, the system just isn’t scalable. Funnelling the creation of every page through the web designer is disastrously inefficient and ultimately bound to throttle off the lifeblood of any site: new and up-to-date content.

In other words, the static web page authoring with which Dreamweaver made its name and which built the web as we know it, is in terminal decline. The solution is to turn to a dedicated content management system such as the big three open source options: WordPress, Joomla and, my personal favourite, Drupal.

Using a CMS the web master doesn’t create each website page, but rather builds the framework to enable end users (whether workgroup members or site visitors) to create the content. In addition a CMS comes with features such as commenting and feeds built-in, while access to thousands of add-on modules provides the ability to produce sites that the static designer can only dream of.

Best of all, thanks to the open-source principle of community sharing, this power is made available to non-coding designers for free. Indeed, once the CMS has been installed, all the site designer and content contributors need is a browser (helped greatly by invaluable browser add-ins such as Firebug and FireFTP).

So how does Dreamweaver fit in to this new browser-based model of community-based development and community-based authoring?

Good question. Once you’ve been won over to the power and elegance of CMS-based development, Dreamweaver suddenly looks inherently old-fashioned and out-of-step – a standalone, offline, desktop application fundamentally at odds with the community-based, online, browser-based web. Remember that Tim Berners-Lee always envisaged the browser as the authoring application. CMS can be seen as a natural return to the web’s roots and Dreamweaver and static authoring in general as a temporary aberration.

That’s why, when Devin Fernandez, senior product manager for the web products at Adobe responded to my post promising that Dreamweaver CS5 would adapt, I remained unconvinced. Essentially I couldn’t see how that would be possible. As I said at the time: “The future for creating web design is in the browser not in Dreamweaver.”

A new hope

So what is so exciting about the new Dreamweaver? As you’ll see from my full Dreamweaver CS5 review there’s plenty of interest but, most important in this context, Dreamweaver CS5 embraces the concept of a CMS with a vengeance. This is immediately apparent in the far deeper support for PHP, the scripting language with which the main CMS are built. Deeper still is Dreamweaver CS5’s new support for site-specific code hints, in particular for the big three open-source CMS: WordPress, Joomla and Drupal.

To take full control of your CMS site developing, PHP skills are a real advantage, but CMS-based community sharing is designed to cut down on the need for programming and to enable the creation of fully customised sites without it. So what does Dreamweaver CS5 offer the non-coding CMS designer, as opposed to developer?

It’s here that Dreamweaver CS5 really surprised me. Previously Dreamweaver’s Live View mode was designed to let you view a single local static page as rendered in the built-in WebKit browser. That was pretty much hopeless for managing a CMS because the pages on a CMS site don’t actually exist (apart from via caching) until all the contributing logic and CSS files are processed on the server and the final page generated and returned to the browser. Now in Dreamweaver CS5 you can load a local CMS or even enter a live URL and then, thanks to new Live Navigation, drill through the site to any CMS page.

Crucially you aren’t limited to simply viewing the rendered page. Using the Related Files toolbar and Dreamweaver CS5’s new Dynamically Related Files capability you can view and edit (if it’s your site) all of the files – HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS – that together define the page. Using the new Inspect mode you can also quickly inspect the cascade of CSS rules that are determining current formatting and then quickly edit them Firebug-style.

Essentially Adobe has recognised that the only way to manage CMS-based site development is within the browser, so has enabled Dreamweaver CS5 to act as one. More than this, it offers all of Dreamweaver’s longstanding offline power and more within the new live environment to provide a browser turbo-charged for both CMS-based developer and designer.

It’s exciting stuff on two main fronts: Firstly Dreamweaver CS5 promises to play a major part in enhancing the quality of the user-contributed modules and themes that define the core CMS, something that will benefit all users (and in the process render Dreamweaver unnecessary for many). Secondly it provides a natural and powerful route for those professional users who stick with Dreamweaver to learn how to customise and move beyond off-the-shelf modules and themes, the main limitation of the CMS approach. Eventually these users will become experts themselves and can contribute back to the CMS community.

I’m delighted to admit that I was wrong to believe that Dreamweaver couldn’t adapt to the browser-based future of CMS-based web design. However, I still believe I was right on the major thrust of my argument, namely that static page-based publishing is dying and that the future for web design lies with the major content management systems. Based on Dreamweaver CS5, it looks like Adobe agrees.

Dreamweaver CS5 has embraced CMS; now it’s time for the average web designer to do the same.

Adobe is playing down the significance of its decision and seems to be hoping that no-one will notice and will simply upgrade to CS5 Web Premium. However it’s not just a fundamental repositioning, it’s the end of an era: effectively it’s the end of the veteran Macromedia Studio combination – Dreamweaver / Fireworks / Flash (and to a lesser extent Contribute) – which has played such a crucial role in building the web as we know it today.

So what is Adobe up to? Is it right? And what should end users do?

In its press briefings, Adobe presented its decision as if it was somehow a response to popular demand – presumably “we demand less choice!” – which is clearly preposterous. However the company has sweetened the pill considerably by offering the Web Premium upgrade price to Web Standard users which, at £476 (exc VAT) for upgrades to the four Standard apps and five new programs costing £2,250 (exc VAT) as standalones, may well seem like an unmissable bargain.

No doubt many existing users will upgrade, but as Kevin Partner points out in his “Adobe: friend-or-foe of the web design community?” post, what about new users? Do you really now have to spend £1,429 (exc VAT) to become a modern web designer? What happened to creating the Web in Notepad!

More to the point is upgrading a good choice for existing users? It may look good value this time around, but what about next time? And is Web Premium actually a bargain and the right move?

Let’s look at what you get for your money over and above the former Web Standard.

First of all, you get the new Photoshop Extended and Illustrator. These are Adobe’s powerful bitmap and vector flagships, but do they really add useful new power to web workflows? (see my “What’s the point of Photoshop Extended?”) In fact the reverse is more likely: they add unnecessary complexity when you already have the web-optimised, combined graphics handling of Fireworks.

In addition Web Premium, users get the new Flash Builder for creating full-blown Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and the brand-new Flash Catalyst which can be used to design the interfaces for Builder. That’s clearly a major step forward for Flash developers, but while most web designers can stretch to editing HTML/CSS, they aren’t programmers and don’t want to be. Which is where Catalyst proves its real importance because it is also designed to convert designs created with Photoshop and Illustrator into simple Flash applications with no coding. It’s Flash Catalyst, then, that becomes the core of the Web Premium suite and makes real sense of the inclusion of Photoshop and Illustrator.

Flash front and centre

Ultimately, apart from Acrobat Pro (which is included in all CS editions), all the new Web Premium additions are concerned with one thing: helping both developer and non-coding designer to embrace Flash. And not just any Flash. In the old Macromedia days, Flash was used as a way to add some impact to your HTML/CSS web pages; now it’s promoted as a self-sufficient web platform in its own right, with the browser’s primary function being to host the cross-platform player and self-contained content.

Flash-phobics will be appalled but a strong case can be made that moving towards full-blown Flash/Flex is the natural progression for web design, as end users increasingly expect a design-rich, fully-engaging, desktop-style experience that HTML/CSS and the browser just can’t deliver. Moreover they now expect this experience from any and all devices which is why the Flash- and AIR-based Open Screen Project is so important.

With its cross-platform penetration (apart from Apple), unrivalled design power and Creative Suite integration and user base, Adobe clearly believes (or hopes) that Flash will become the high-end web platform of the future and Web Premium the primary authoring environment. As such, you could argue that Adobe’s repositioning is just helping its users to move on from the increasingly old-fashioned static page-based model of web design and adapt to the bright new future of coded and uncoded Flash.

Other options

However before you upgrade to Web Premium, I’d recommend thinking carefully about your other options.

Firstly I’d argue that non-programming web designers would actually be  better advised to spend a little extra and upgrade to CS5 Design Premium, which is effectively Web Premium but with Flash Builder and Contribute swapped for InDesign. The latest CS5 release of InDesign is now capable of acting as a powerful authoring tool to produce Flash-based publications and is actually a much better option than the awkward and shaky first release of Catalyst for non-coding designers.

More importantly should you upgrade to a suite at all? If you’re not convinced about Flash then there’s very little attraction in either of the Premium suite options and, of course, they only represent good value if you are actually going to use the additional apps that they contain.

So what about upgrading the individual Web Standard components? The changes to Fireworks CS5 are minimal and Contribute is looking terminally old-fashioned, underpowered and misconceived. The new Flash Professional CS5 is certainly more impressive but, with the increasing design strength of HTML/CSS, the need for embedded, as opposed to full-blown, Flash is actually becoming less pressing. And the advent of HTML 5 is likely to go even further and rob Flash of its current crucial media playback role.

Which leaves Dreamweaver. This is a subject I plan to return to, but from my Dreamweaver CS5 review it should be clear that I’m seriously impressed by the latest release. Rather than upgrading to Web Premium, most page-based Web Standard users could save a lot of money by just upgrading Dreamweaver.

Or they could save their money entirely. The most powerful new feature in Dreamweaver CS5 is the way that it embraces the three main open-source content management systems (CMS): WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. I’ve written before about how content management systems can take page-based authoring into new and exciting Web 2.0 territory – most notably enabling end user content contribution. Now Adobe has brought this thinking right into Dreamweaver and into the mainstream.

For advanced CMS workflows Dreamweaver CS5 now has a surprising amount to offer, but that comes later. For now, my advice to the majority of new users and current Web Standard users who aren’t won over by Adobe’s Flash-based vision is to save your money and instead invest your time in getting to grips with a CMS.

Now I’ve come across a brand name that’s possibly even worse…

Mollom.  Mollom is an interesting new online service designed to help cut down the amount of spam comments and content that Web 2.0 sites have to deal with while avoiding putting off genuine contributors with unnecessary captcha barriers. The technology might be cutting-edge but the name certainly isn’t, in fact it sounds medieval. Moreover, like “Drupal”, “Mollom” manages to pull off the difficult trick of being pathetically comical and seriously depressing at the same time.

Astonishingly the man behind Mollom is none other than… Dries Buytaert.

Surely this has to be too much of a coincidence? And I think I’ve found a clue to what’s going on. While selecting a language for Mollom to operate in, I was rather surprised to be offered the choice of Old English and Middle English (I’m not joking, take a look at the screenshot).

Mollom's language choice

Two obvious possibilities spring to mind. Does anyone know if there’s a thriving community of Old English speakers that has somehow lived on in Belgium? Alternatively, does anyone know if there are a pair of ugly giants or dwarves in Beowulf or Tolkein called “Drupal” and “Mollom”?

And does anyone have any suitably uninspiring suggestions for Dries’ next project?

I’m glad to say that I think I’ve come across a near-perfect solution…

There really shouldn’t be a problem in the first place: a CMS provides efficient, flexible and scalable centralized control over content while CSS (the Cascading Style Sheet markup language) is designed to provide efficient, flexible and scalable centralized control over presentation. In theory it’s a match made in heaven.

In practice it’s anything but. The problem is that creating a comprehensive style sheet that takes in every possible design element (heading, table, block, list, menu, button and so on) as well as every foible of CSS and, crucially, every bug in the various browser implementations (IE take a bow) is way beyond most users’ capabilities.

The current best workaround for the average user brave enough to move beyond the in-built default themes is to take advantage of the designs that you find on free template sites. It’s a huge advance but it’s only a partial solution. Off-the-shelf templates inherently mean design that is neither unique to your site nor tailor-made to your content.

Now however there’s an alternative.

At first sight Artisteer looks seriously unpromising – an automatic theme creator that generates unique designs every time you click the Suggest Design button sounds like a recipe for design disaster. In practice it really delivers the goods as I discuss in the full Artisteer 2.1 review . And with version 2.x’s ability to export your designs as ready-to-go themes for Joomla, Wordpress and Drupal you can begin exploring your new custom design live on your site within minutes.

With Artisteer’s various Suggestion commands you can quickly hone in on an overall look-and-feel, but what about the inevitable tweaks and iterations involved in any real world design process? It’s here that Artisteer really proves itself a worthy partner to CMS / CSS with its own beautifully efficient, flexible and scalable centralized design engine letting you take ever more granular control over your presentation as-and-when you need it.

The end result, as I say in the review, is that Artisteer makes it “child’s play to automatically create fully customised tailor-made themes that look good and work well”. By providing the bridge that connects CMS and CSS, Artisteer could be the key to unlocking the full and extraordinary potential of both. I strongly recommend giving the free trial a spin.

Admittedly I’m biased on this, but I couldn’t help feeling that the responses were divided into two camps: those who had actually tried both approaches who largely agreed and those who hadn’t, who didn’t and who felt threatened by the suggestion and who wanted to close down the debate. 

Between these two extremes I hope that there were plenty of more open-minded designers who were intrigued and ideally excited about the possibilities. After all, the cms approach doesn’t just offer more power, each of the cms solutions is open source and so free. That should mean that there’s nothing to stop you exploring both approaches and then making your mind up…

Unfortunately it’s not quite as simple as this. However, with a little help, it can be…

The problem hits immediately – installation. Visit the big three cms sites and you can quickly download the latest releases but you then have to set these up on your own hosting space. The ease with which this is done varies with each cms but suddenly you’re talking about MySQL databases, permissions, configuration files and so on and before you know it you’re reading through reams of baffling support pages discussing the finer points of table prefixes. This is frankly terrifying for your average page-based designer used to the simplicity of copying their local pages to their remote host.

It doesn’t have to be this way. To avoid such installation nightmares all you need is a host that provides decent cPanel support. This will provide you with a control panel that provides all the tools that you need to set up your database, ftp and unzip the cms files into position, back up your database, flush caches, manage table prefixes and so on…

Oh dear this is beginning to sound almost as bad. But it doesn’t have to be this way either. 

Instead you can just click on your cPanel’s Fantastico button (the one with a nice smiley face) and take advantage of one-click installs. Within a minute or so you can have copies of each of the main three cms options up and running (and plenty of others too). It really is unbelievably simple and I strongly recommend that you give it a go – visit the Fantastico site and there’s a list of hosting partners offering Fantastico support for a pittance a month. 

Fantastico is a huge step forward, but immediately I’ll put in two major caveats.

Firstly Fantastico isn’t foolproof. I remember first recommending it a couple of years ago for installing Drupal and, by the time the article came out, the current version simply didn’t work (due to a clash in table character set). I think the cms developers have now appreciated the importance of Fantastico to initial set up and first impressions and crucially, in its latest Fantastico Deluxe form, to encouraging prompt security fix updating complete with built in backup, so hopefully compatibility shouldn’t be an issue nowadays…

But in any case I’m not suggesting that you should rely on Fantastico. If you’re going to get serious about cms you have to realise just how fundamentally different it is to static page-based publishing and you have to get fully grips with how and why, and the implications.

Switching from Dreamweaver to cms-based publishing is not something you can do in a minute. Expect it to take at least a year (and don’t judge the possibilities on the default set-ups!) and in that time make sure that you do learn about MySQL and cms handling and in particular get to grips with installation, backup, migration and security updating without Fantastico. This is where all those other cPanel utilities like phpMyAdmin come in. Fantastico shouldn’t be seen as a replacement to these but as an addition.  

Crucially what Fantastico does offer is the chance to freely and painlessly put your toe in the Web 2.0 cms water. Thanks to Fantastico there really is no excuse not to give content management systems a try.

In fact if your current host is cPanel-based you might well find that you already have access to Fantastico and could be exploring what WordPress, Joomla and Drupal – my favoured option – have to offer in a matter of minutes. If not, you could sign up for a month’s trial with an ISP that does provide Fantastico support for as little as $7. If you’re currently a static page-based Dreamweaver author, that could prove the best investment you ever make.

Based on my core argument – that the future of web design lies with content management systems (cms) rather than Dreamweaver – I was expecting an uncomfortable time. Thankfully Devin is far too nice for that. More than that he seemed genuinely pleased to have had a debate opened up and a chance to hear what the community is thinking about Dreamweaver and the future of web design…

Naturally Devin hopes and believes that Dreamweaver is going to remain central to future web workflows and was keen to stress that the program is always evolving. As such we chatted about some of the introductions in the latest Dreamweaver CS4 such as the HTML table-based Ajax handling, the new compound file support and advanced CSS navigation.

To my mind, Dreamweaver CS4’s HTML table-based Ajax handling is simultaneously over-complicated and underpowered and is a good example of the web 2.0 wall that Dreamweaver is hitting in the static HTML page context. However (as I pointed out in my review) the other two features are certainly significant advances and show Dreamweaver moving forwards from the old model of the simple standalone HTML page to embrace today’s more complex compound reality. 

Moreover, as Devin pointed out, these features prove especially useful in the cms context where the compound page is the norm and drilling down to find and edit CSS rules a nightmare. In short Devin made the case that Dreamweaver has a lot to offer cms-based users and doesn’t see cms as an either/or alternative but rather as a partner it can work with, just as it does with the Ajax frameworks.

Without making any explicit commitments, Devin also made it clear that Dreamweaver users can expect further developments when it comes to integration with the big three frameworks:- WordPress, Joomla and Drupal. In particular, knowing I’m a Drupal fan, he recommended that I check out the work Chris Charlton is doing with his Dreamweaver Drupal extension that integrates the Drupal API directly into Dreamweaver. 

We also discussed just how important the mission of bringing good design to cms is. I couldn’t agree more. Some people seemed to think that I was arguing that we should rip out today’s websites and replace them with blogs. That is absolutely not the case. The goal must be to produce truly attractive cms sites that look as if they were hand-crafted in Dreamweaver but with all the web 2.0 functionality – commenting, voting, rss feeds, in-browser content contribution, optimal tag-based navigation, scalability – that static HTML inherently can’t deliver. 

This design mission is crucial but I’m not convinced that Dreamweaver is necessarily central to it. Or even necessary at all for the average user. At the moment the general standard of cms design is beyond dreadful but that’s because the design potential of cms hasn’t begun to be grasped by its user base which is still primarily made up of developers. 

This is most immediately evident when it comes to theming. The ability to quickly explore hundreds of attractive high quality themes is a massive strength but incredibly most cms users still stick with the unbelievably ugly default theme. This is a travesty. If the average cms user spent just one day exploring the themes available, the design quality of their work would take off and the design reputation of cms with it. Indeed by piggy-backing off the work of leading designers, and so ensuring site-wide consistency and best practice and avoiding unhelpful design excesses, a themed cms site can embarrass many hand-crafted static sites. It might even validate!

Off-the-shelf cms themes will take most sites most of the way to where they want to go. Devin argued that Dreamweaver is the essential tool that cms users need to go the extra distance and get exactly the results they want. I’m sure that Dreamweaver does play this key role for the majority of theme developers and also for most of the module developers creating the cms logic. As many of the comments from developers on my original article pointed out, the cms frameworks that I’m talking about simply wouldn’t exist if it wasn’t for Dreamweaver. 

That’s true and a major reason to be grateful to Dreamweaver and to wish it well. However the numbers involved creating the cms framework is inherently small compared to the numbers using it. That’s the point: the module or theme creator does the hard work and generously donates it so that end users don’t have to. For the cms end user I’d argue that a 5% role for Dreamweaver is a very different role to today’s 100%. Will cms-based designers prove willing to pay $hundreds for a support tool when the cms itself, in which they do 95% of their work, is free? 

In any case, despite its undoubted power, I’m not convinced that Dreamweaver will necessarily prove the best tool for the average designer wanting to extend their cms handling. In fact Dreamweaver’s all-round power and the associated complexity becomes more of a drawback than an advantage. For tweaking a theme’s CSS, for example, a lightweight dedicated approach makes more sense – something like Chris Pederick’s excellent and free Web Developer add-on for Firefox which works live in the browser. 

In the longer term I believe that an end-to-end, high-quality design solution will be provided in the browser and largely by the cms frameworks themselves. Already image handling and wysiwyg editing have improved out of all recognition. And, using advanced modules such as Drupal’s excellent Panels (which lets you break up your layout to break out from blog-style listings) and the stunning Views 2 (which lets you pull out any content based on any criteria to drop into those panels), you can produce beautiful sites based on completely custom designs that give no indication that they were produced with a cms apart from their additional web 2.0 functionality. And the design capabilities of the cms frameworks are only going to get better. 

So where does all this leave Dreamweaver? 

Working with the web’s constantly changing open standards has always been Dreamweaver’s greatest strength and, from the chat with Devin, it’s clear that Adobe is well aware of the rise of the cms frameworks and of what they can do. It will certainly be interesting to see what future releases come up with in terms of support for cms. Moving to truly dedicated support will represent a step-change and help unleash the next generation of content management systems.

And as the content management systems get more powerful, more attractive and more usable they will attract more developers and designers who will come to appreciate the enormous benefits of building on the work of others rather than trying to do everything themselves. Moreover, as some of these developers and designers put something back into the communal pool of high quality logic and design, the arguments for joining up to the cms project become more and more compelling. A standalone user can already, with a lot of effort, use today’s cms frameworks to produce a site that looks and acts as if had been built by a massive team of design and development talent (which in a way it has). Over time the results possible and the ease of use with which they can be achieved will rise dramatically. The potential is extraordinary. 

Both Devin and I agree that the cms frameworks are going to get more powerful and that Dreamweaver will play an important role in this. However we differ over how this is likely to play out and the implications. My argument is that the cms frameworks are completely different to the Ajax frameworks because they represent a far more fundamental shift; a shift that will redefine how future designers and developers go about creating the website itself – the role that Dreamweaver currently fills.

Dreamweaver has been the central player behind the page-based web and the custom-made application-based web. I believe that it will also play a major part in creating the content management systems that will come to replace it as the web’s main driving force.

Tom Arah