Artisteer 2 and Dreamweaver CS5

I’ve been trying out the demo for Artisteer 2 and it’s great. Creating templates for popular CMS softwares such as WordPress, Joomla, and Drupal have never been easier. I’ve done some playing around with manually creating a WordPress template and it’s not too bad. The WordPress documentation is fairly easy to follow. But doing it in Artisteer is a lot quicker. There’s 2 versions of the software, a home/academic edition that will create WordPress templates for $50 and a standard edition that will allow you to create templates for the other CMS (Joomla, Drupal, etc) for $130. So far I only need the home edition since I use WordPress but at work we also use Joomla. I don’t normally create the layouts at work so I’m hesitating to buy the home edition. I have sent them an email to see if there’s an upgrade path from home to standard and the cost. My work will not pay for the software and if they do, it will take such a long time to get since they only purchase things through purchase orders (sigh).

Now I’ve been curious about Dreamweaver CS5. I’m currently using CS3 with Espresso. I rarely use Dreamweaver’s auto coding – it’s too bulky. I like coding by hand. Espresso is great for that and it’s lightweight and fast. It just doesn’t have the design view tab like Dreamweaver does. Adobe also has a student/teacher version of the software for only $150. I’m downloading a trial version now and will check it out. I’m curious about the CMS code “sniffer” that they have.

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4 Comments

  1. have you had any success with the Dreamweaver software and i so which one seems to be easier (or rather what are your opinions of the two when making comparisons?)thank you!!

    1. @allisonp06 the code sniffer feature is helpful but i’ve only gotten it to work with css. this should work if the file is located remotely, like linking to a remote css file. the server-side, php, works but is limited and has to be local. i have found that aptana has a better code sniffer especially with php. unfortunately, i can’t use aptana at work being that more than 1 developer is working on the same project at the same time. this is where dreamweaver is great with their check-in/check-out system. as for developing templates for wordpress, joomla, etc. i find that artisteer is easier to use. what i don’t like is it auto-generates additional files and classes – this is because a lot of things are created dynamically. i prefer to learn about how templating works within wordpress or joomla then just create it using dreamweaver in code view. that way, i know every inch of the code which makes troubleshooting easier. but i’m a programmer first, designer second – rather designer last. if you’re a designer and don’t want to mess with code that much, and want to develop templates, artisteer might be the better choice. i believe they still have a demo you can try before you buy.

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