WebDeveloper.com Software Review / Dreamweaver 2

Dreamweaver 2: The Return
(part 3)

By David Fiedler

But wait...there's more!

Claim: Visual Site Map: for site management. Automatic Link Management: now professional designers can deal with links as easily as if they were using Microsoft FrontPage.

What we found: The site management facilities are much improved. You can pretty much have Dreamweaver draw a site map in seconds; unfortunately the defaults will not work for most people, as they attempt to draw a map that's 200 icons wide. Changing the value to 8 makes things a bit more reasonable:

The site map is not in itself the main draw of Dreamweaver 2, but it's quite useful: bad links are indicated in red, and any file icon can be right-clicked to expand it (if it has more links or objects within it); change or remove one of its links; open it in Dreamweaver (if it's an HTML file), or transfer it to/from the Web server. Oh, and you can click on any one to use it as a link target in a Web page you're editing...very slick, and it is certainly as easy as FrontPage.

Dreamweaver's new file transfer facilities rival single-purpose FTP programs. With a single click, you can select all files that are newer on your computer than on a remote server (or vice-versa) for a further one-click transfer of all of them en masse. You can also do sitewide global link changes, and check for broken internal links (rather quickly, too).

Even better, Dreamweaver knows about the common technique of coding URLs relative to a site's root, and can work with such links for their eventual destination on the server, even as it knows the absolute location of the file on your local disk. Macromedia has done a very nice job here!

Claim: Dream Templates: design a page, save it as a template, and lock certain sections, so that a coder can come along and use it as a template for a new page without screwing something up.

What we found: this also works, although a bit inconsistently. It's easy to save a file as a template and set up editable or locked areas. When you create a new page from a template file, the template itself isn't opened directly in Dreamweaver, so you can't muck it up by accident.

Attempting to edit a locked area of the screen in WYSIWYG mode produces a warning bong; you just can't do it. However, I had some bad moments when I tested the locked code in HTML mode. Dreamweaver was supposed to highlight locked and editable code in different colors, but it didn't, and you could delete anything you wanted. Fortunately, though, exiting the built-in HTML editor didn't write out the file after these excursions, though I was worried because the behavior was different from WYSIWYG mode. All bets are off, of course, if you use Notepad or something else on the HTML directly.

Nothing stops you from editing any part of a template file itself, either in WYSIWYG or HTML mode. To protect those, you'd have to resort to the protection schemes of the underlying operating system, or the good graces of your other team members. But they're stored in their own directory, so it's relatively painless to set this up once without constant maintenance.