Dreamweaver and PHP

A buddy of mine asked me today what I use to develop my websites in. I told him that I've always used homesite. When he heard this he almost had a heart attack. He was dumbfounded that I would choose to use homesite over dreamweaver. He said that using dreamweaver would up my productivity and make my development alot easier.

My question to you is this: I develop my websites primarily in php. I've never used a wysiwyg editor in my life, so I know my way around laying things out directly in the HTML. What can dreamweaver offer me that is so phenomenally better then homesite??

actualley i use EditPlus, its 30 day registration, but it just keeps working...

its good for all webbased developments, php, JS, html, and it highlights variables and stuff, i cant think of any options that this does not have, its a rly good editor

but i dont know, if im not mistakn, dreamweaver is also a text editor, and for php, it does nto rly matter what u use, text is text, as long as u got basic highlighting features, its all good

Well I know for a fact that he's not a php developer. I believe his language of choice is ASP. So is Dreamweaver better for ASP programmers then PHP?

He was wondering how I use widgets and such.. I just said well homesite has snippets which let you copy a predefined block of code into a page.. which is basically what a widget is. He seemed perplexed at my answer tho.

I use Dreamweaver, but I have it set up to emulate HomeSite, at least for the layout.

All the extra crap that's in there really doesn't turn my crank...I love the built-in FTP, for easy previews while working. I love the syntax highlighting.

That's about it.

MPEDrummer

I don't see how you can code anything in dreamweaver that has absolutly anything to do with PHP considering you would have to go through and escape all the quotes IMO it would take longer usinf DW

Dreamweaver in StudioMX 2004 supports PHP and PHP snippets. I haven't had any trouble with it. Works great and is pretty seamless from design to code. The new Dreamweaver behaves more like and IDE than ever before. PHP, ASP, JSP are all supported now and very well. Another cool benefit is that it support sftp ssh tunnles. I thought that was a really cool addition.

I've used Dreamweaver since 1.0. Granted on that version it left lots to be desired. However, I was able to upgrade to Studio MX 2004 and the whole suite of apps are amazingly stable.

Some say that MacroMedia is just one Cut away from Micro$oft Media, but at this point, it works and I don't care.

I'm still a Linux gentoo junkie and would rather stick acid soaked needles in my eyes than wrestle ever again with a IIS X version.

BobB

So far we have the following good points for DW:

1. Snippets
2. Built in FTP
3. Syntax Highlighting

The version of Homesite that I use (5.5 I believe) has all of these features.

So I still don't see the pros of moving myself to DW.

Yeah, I vote no, really. Hell, I use DW and I vote no.

Which is not to say I don't love DW...but all the extra features are really for "point-and-click" coders, not for a hand-coder like yourself. I use DW like a glorified notepad that happens to have a slick FTP in it.

If you already own Homesite, don't waste your money, cause it sounds like you won't use the other features.

MPEDrummer

I disagree! Dreamweaver is an excellent tool to speed up productivity. There is a lot pre-written scripts (written by Dreamweaver and other programmers) that is not only free, but extremely usefull. Don't get me wrong, I think it is very important to hand code certain things, but why spend 4 hours to do something you can do in 10 minutes.

I have been using Dreamweaver since version 4.0 and have found it to be very usefull.

men
dw mx and mx2004 are bigger, slower, have a lot of stuff you'll never use in your life, and they cost a lot

i use notepad++, it is open source, loads as fast as the ms notepad, supports highlighting for a lot of languajes, has tabbs for the opened files and a lot more.... haha i sound like a google add

it is better to hand code, when i switched from dw mx2004 to notepad++ i felt 'insecure' cause it does not have the code completion for functions, but now i've found my scripts run the first time, no more unexpected_t_string and that kind of crap, and that is valid for html too, if you want to be a good programer dont use wysiwyg, al least in the beggining of your times
link to notepad++

Well, just trying Dreamweaver doesn't mean you have to stick with it. Download an evaluation version from Macromedia and give it s shot, if you like it, cool - if not, stick with your HomeSite.

Since someone mentioned text editors:
I've never heard of Notepad++, but I have worked with a LOT of text editors and ConTEXT seems like a good one to have.

But... to each his own.

I've worked in the web industry for nearly 10 years now. I don't know a single programmer that has been programming for more than a year that still uses any of the WYSIWYG type editors. I don't care what new doodads they cram in there. They just have too bad a track record. They generate inefficient code and they bog down your system resources. There's just no excuse for my text editor to be using 60 mb of ram.

Personally, I recommend textpad or komodo. All of the features you'd want in a text editor are available for these:

sytnax highlighting
integrated parsers
regular expression pattern matching for search and replaces
code snippets
under 10 mb of system resources even when I have 80 documents open (for textpad at least, haven't done that in komodo)
and more (now how much would you pay?)

Komodo in particular has the awesome ability to expand or collapse code blocks. It automatically generates a + or - next to the line number when ever you open a code block with a curly brace. This is really helpful when developing because you can go and collapse all of the functions you aren't working on and expand the ones that you are editing, making it very easy to keep track of where you are.

Textpad is nagware with a low registration fee of $30 if you ever decide to support the fine programmers that created it. Komodo is $30 also, but only offers a 30 day trial period. Both are well worth the money and I was happy to support both companies.

Dreamweaver is a toy compared to Zend Studio 3.5, at least when it comes to PHP development.

So by me admitting that I use Dreamweaver, I am a WYSIWYG user and therefore inferior? (And by saying "I", I speak for others.) I hardly ever use the WYSIWYG feature, except when I need to see how something looks real quick before I continue coding.

I like Zend Studio, but I could use all the features and didn't have the will to make provisions so I could, so I stuck with Dreamweaver which I use side-by-side with ConTEXT. I wish there was a mix between Dreamweaver and Zend studio, because szometime I switch back and forth (Zend keeps track of the variables I create and ofers them in a drop-down list while typing - slick).

I do agree Dreamweaver has a LOT of garbola in it I don't need. Macromedia wanted to make something that beginners and experts could use alike. But, I paid for it, so I am gonna use the damn thing and get my money's worth (it came with Studio, which I bought mainly for Flash).

The main point to this thread is this I suppose: try something, and if you don't like it, try something else. As long as you can write a sweet applicaiton or website, you'r good anyway no matter what you use. I won't bash anyone (unless you use Word or FrontPage).

Anyway, I'm just rambling on about a dead horse...

DW isn't inferior to Zend Studio due to its inclusion of WYSIWYG editing capabilities. DW just simply isn't designed for robust PHP application development. It tries to be all things to all developers and falls short of providing a truly robust toolset. Zend Studio does one thing and does it well - it is hands down the best PHP IDE on the market.

I would say the same thing about DW in comparison to Visual Studio.NET for ASP.NET development, or in comparison to WSAD/Eclipse or JDeveloper or JBuilder (etc) for J2EE development.